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TALKS 



ON 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 



BY 



ARLO BATES 







BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

<m>z MMzimt J&re&j, Camlinbae 

1897 



&35 



COPYRIGHT, 1897 

BY ARLO BATES 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



This volume is made up from a course of lectures 
delivered under the auspices of the Lowell Institute in 
the autumn of 1895. These have been revised and to 
some extent rewritten, and the division into chapters 
made ; but there has been no essential change. 



CONTENTS 







PAGE 


I. 


What Literature Is . 


. 1 


II. 


Literary Expression 


23 


III. 


The Study of Literature . 


. 33 


IV. 


Why we Study Literature . 


45 


V. 


False Methods 


. 60 


VI. 


Methods of Study .... 


69 . 


VII. 


The Language of Literature . 


. 88 


VIII. 


The Intangible Language 


. Ill 


IX. 


The Classics 


. 123 


X. 


The Value of the Classics . 


. 135 


XI. 


The Greater Classics 


. 142 


XIL 


Contemporary Literature 


. 154 


XIII. 


New Books and Old .... 


. 167 


XIV. 


Fiction 


. 184 


XV. 


Fiction and Life 


. 199 


XVI. 


Poetry 


. 219 


XVII. 


The Texture of Poetry 


. 227 


XVIII. 


Poetry and Life .... 


. 241 



TALKS ON THE STUDY OF 
LITERATURE 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 

As all life proceeds from the egg, so all dis- 
cussion must proceed from a definition. Indeed, 
it is generally necessary to follow definition by 
definition, fixing the meaning of the terms used in 
the original explanation, and again explaining the 
words employed in this exposition. 

I once heard a learned but somewhat pedantic 
man begin to answer the question of a child by 
saying that a lynx is a wild quadruped. He was 
allowed to get no further, but was at once asked 
what a quadruped is. He responded that it is a 
mammal with four feet. This of course provoked 
the inquiry what a mammal is; and so on from 
one question to another, until the original subject 
was entirely lost sight of, and the lynx disap- 
peared in a maze of verbal distinctions as com- 
pletely as it might have vanished in the tangles of 
the forest primeval. I feel that I am not wholly 
safe from danger of repeating the experience of 
this well-meaning pedant if I attempt to give a 



2 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

definition of literature. The temptation is strong 
to content myself with saying : " Of course we all 
know what literature is." The difficulty which I 
have had in the endeavor to frame a satisfactory 
explanation of the term has convinced me, how- 
ever, that it is necessary to assume that few of us 
do know, and has impressed upon me the need of 
trying to make clear what the word means to me. 
If my statement seem insufficient for general ap- 
plication, it will at least show the sense which I 
shall give to " literature " in these talks. 

In its most extended signification literature of 
course might be taken to include whatever is writ- 
ten or printed ; but our concern is with that por- 
tion only which is indicated by the name " polite 
literature," or by the imported term " belles-lettres," 
— both antiquated though respectable phrases. In 
other words, I wish to confine my examination to 
those written works which can properly be brought 
within the scope of literature as one of the fine 
arts. 

Undoubtedly we all have a general idea of the 
limitations which are implied by these various 
terms, and we are not without a more or less 
vague notion of what is indicated by the word 
literature in its most restricted and highest sense. 
The important point is whether our idea is clear 
and well realized. We have no difficulty in saying 
that one book belongs to art and that another 
does not; but we often find ourselves perplexed 
when it comes to telling why. We should all 
agree that " The Scarlet Letter " is literature and 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 3 

that the latest sensational novel is not, — but are 
we sure what makes the difference? We know 
that Shakespeare wrote poetry and Tupper dog- 
gerel, but it by no means follows that we can al- 
ways distinguish doggerel from poetry ; and while 
it is not perhaps of consequence whether we are 
able to inform others why we respect the work of 
one or another, it is of much importance that we 
be in a position to justify our tastes to ourselves. 
It is not hard to discover whether we enjoy a 
book, and it is generally possible to tell why we 
like it; but this is not the whole of the matter. 
It is necessary that we be able to estimate the 
justice of our preferences. We must remember 
that our liking or disliking is not only a test of 
the book, — but is a test of us as well. There is 
no more accurate gauge of the moral character of 
a man than the nature of the books which he 
really cares for. He who would progress by the 
aid of literature must have reliable standards by 
which to judge his literary feelings and opinions ; 
he must be able to say : " My antipathy to such a 
work is justified by this or by that principle ; my 
pleasure in that other is fine because for these 
reasons the book itself is noble." 

It is hardly possible to arrive at any clear un- 
derstanding of what is meant by literature as an 
art, without some conception of what constitutes 
art in general. Broadly speaking, art exists in 
consequence of the universal human desire for 
sympathy. Man is forever endeavoring to break 
down the wall which separates him from his fel- 



4 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

lows. Whether we call it egotism or simply hu- 
manity, we all know the wish to make others 
appreciate our feelings ; to show them how we 
suffer, how we enjoy. We batter our fellow-men 
with our opinions sufficiently often, but this is 
as nothing to the insistence with which we pour 
out to them our feelings. A friend is the most 
valued of earthly possessions largely because he 
is willing to receive without appearance of impa- 
tience the unending story of our mental sensa- 
tions. We are all of us more or less conscious of 
the constant impulse which urges us on to ex- 
pression; of the inner necessity which moves us 
to continual endeavors to make others share our 
thoughts, our experiences, but most of all our 
emotions. It seems to me that if we trace this 
instinctive desire back far enough, we reach the 
beginnings of art. 

It may seem that the splendidly immeasurable 
achievements of poetry and painting, of architec- 
ture, of music and sculpture, are far enough from 
this primal impulse ; but I believe that in it is 
to be found their germ. Art began with the first 
embodiment of human feelings by permanent 
means. Let us suppose, by way of illustration, 
some prehistoric man, thrilled with awe and ter- 
ror at sight of a mastodon, and scratching upon a 
bone rude lines in the shape of the animal, — not 
only to give information, not only to show what 
the beast was like, but also to convey to his fel- 
lows his feelings when confronted with the mon- 
ster. It is as if he said : " See ! I cannot put into 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 5 

words what I felt ; but look ! the creature was like 
this. Think how you would feel if you came face 
to face with it. Then you will know how I felt." 
Something of this sort may the beginnings of art 
be conceived to have been. 

I do not mean, of course, that the prehistoric 
man who made such a picture — and such a pic- 
ture exists — analyzed his motives. He felt a 
thing which he could not say in words; he in- 
stinctively turned to pictorial representation, — 
and graphic art was born. 

The birth of poetry was probably not entirely 
dissimilar. Barbaric men, exulting in the wild 
delight of victory, may seem unlikely sponsors for 
the infant muse, and yet it is with them that song 
began. The savage joy of the conquerors, too 
great for word, found vent at first in excited, 
bounding leaps and uncouthly ferocious gestures, 
by repetition growing into rhythm; then broke 
into inarticulate sounds which timed the move- 
ments, until these in turn gave place to words, 
gradually moulded into rude verse by the meas- 
ures of the dance. The need of expressing the 
feelings which swell inwardly, the desire of shar- 
ing with others, of putting into tangible form, the 
emotions that thrill the soul is common to all 
human beings ; and it is from this that arises the 
thing which we call art. 

The essence of art, then, is the expression of 
emotion ; and it follows that any book to be a 
work of art must embody sincere emotion. Not 
all works which spring from genuine feeling sue- 



6 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ceed in embodying or conveying it. The writer 
must be sufficiently master of technique to be able 
to make words impart what he would express. 
The emotion phrased must moreover be general 
and in some degree typical. Man is interested 
and concerned in the emotions of men only in so 
far as these throw light on the nature and possi- 
bilities of life. Art must therefore deal with what 
is typical in the sense that it touches the possi- 
bilities of all human nature. If it concerns itself 
with much that only the few can or may experi- 
ence objectively, it has to do with that only which 
all human beings may be conceived of as sharing 
subjectively. Literature may be broadly defined 
as the adequate expression of genuine and typical 
emotion. The definition may seem clumsy, and 
hardly exact enough to be allowed in theoretical 
aesthetics ; but it seems to me sufficiently accurate 
to serve our present purpose. Certainly the essen- 
tials of literature are the adequate embodiment of 
sincere and general feeling. 

By sincerity here we mean that which is not 
conventional, which is not theoretical, not arti- 
ficial; that which springs from a desire honestly 
to impart to others exactly the emotion that has 
been actually felt. By the term "emotion" or 
" feeling " we mean those inner sensations of 
pleasure, excitement, pain, or passion, which are 
distinguished from the merely intellectual pro- 
cesses of the mind, — from thought, perception, 
and reason. It is not necessary to trespass just 
now on the domain of the psychologist by an en- 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 7 

deavor to establish scientific distinctions. We are 
all able to appreciate the difference between what 
we think and what we feel, between those things 
which touch the intellect and those which affect 
the emotional nature. We see a sentence written 
on paper, and are intellectually aware of it ; but 
unless it has for us some especial message, unless 
it concerns us personally, we are not moved by it. 
Most impressions which we receive touch our un- 
derstanding without arousing our feelings. This 
is all so evident that there is not likely to arise in 
your minds any confusion in regard to the mean- 
ing of the phrase " genuine emotion." 

Whatever be the origin of this emotion it must 
be essentially impersonal, and it is generally so in 
form. There are comparatively few works of art 
which are confessedly the record of simple, direct, 
personal experience; and perhaps none of these 
stand in the front rank of literature. Of course 
I am not speaking of literature which takes a per- 
sonal form, like any book written in the first per- 
son; but of those that are avowedly a record of 
actual life. We must certainly include in litera- 
ture works like the " Eeflections " of Marcus Au- 
relius, the " Confessions " of Augustine, and — 
though the cry is far — Rousseau, and the " Jour- 
nal Intime " of Amiel, but there is no one of these 
which is to be ranked high in the scale of the 
world's greatest books. Even in poetry the same 
thing is true. However we may admire " In 
Memoriam " and that much greater poem, Mrs. 
Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese," we are 



8 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

little likely to regard them as standing supremely 
high among the masterpieces. The " Sonnets " of 
Shakespeare which we suppose to be personal are 
yet with supreme art made so impersonal that as 
far as the reader is concerned the experiences 
which they record might be entirely imaginary. 
It is in proportion as a poet is able to give this 
quality which might be called generalization to his 
work that it becomes art. 

The reason of this is not far to seek. If the 
emotion is professedly personal it appeals less 
strongly to mankind, and it is moreover likely to 
interfere with its own effective embodiment. All 
emotion in literature must be purely imaginative 
as far as its expression in words is concerned. Of 
course poetical form may be so thoroughly mas- 
tered as to become almost instinctive, but never- 
theless acute personal feeling must trammel utter- 
ance. It is not that the author does not live 
through what he sets forth. It is that the artistic 
moment is not the moment of experience, but that 
of imaginative remembrance. The " Sonnets from 
the Portuguese " afford admirable examples of what 
I mean. It is well known that these relate a 
most completely personal and individual story. Not 
only the sentiments but the circumstances set forth 
were those of the poet's intimate actual life. It was 
the passion of love and of self-renunciation in her 
own heart which broke forth in the fine sonnet : — 

Go from me, yet I feel that I shall stand 
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore 
Alone upon the threshold of the door 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 9 

Of individual life shall I command 
The uses of my soul ; or lift my hand 

Serenely in the sunshine as hefore 

Without the sense of that which I f ore hore, — 
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land 
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine 

With pulses that heat double. What I do 
And what I dream include thee, as the wine 

Must taste of its own grapes : and when I sue 
God for myself, He hears that name of thine, 

And sees within my eyes the tears of two. 

There came to Mrs. Browning a poignant mo- 
ment when she realized with a thrill of anguish 
what it would mean to her to live out her life 
alone, separated forever from the lover who had 
won her back from the very grasp of death. It 
was not in the pang of that throe that she made of 
it a sonnet ; but afterward, while it was still felt, 
it is true, but felt rather as a memory vividly re- 
produced by the imagination. In so far both he 
who writes impersonally and he who writes per- 
sonally are dealing with that which at the instant 
exists in the imagination. In the latter, however, 
there is still the remembrance of the actuality, the 
vibration of the joy or sorrow of which that im- 
agining is born. Human self - consciousness in- 
trudes itself whenever one is avowedly writing of 
self; sometimes even vanity plays an important 
part. From these and other causes it results that, 
whatever may be the exceptions, the highest work 
is that which phrases the general and the imper- 
sonal with no direct reference to self. Personal 
feeling lies behind all art, and no work can be 
great which does not rest on a basis of experience, 



10 THE STUDY OF LITERA TURE 

more or less remotely ; yet the greatest artist is he 
who embodies emotion, not in terms of his own 
life, but in those which make it equally the prop- 
erty of all mankind. It is feeling no longer ego- 
tistic, but broadly human. If the simile do not 
seem too homely, we might say that the differ- 
ence is that between arithmetic and algebra. In 
the one case it is the working out of a particular 
problem; in the other of an equation which is 
universal. 

Mankind tests art by universal experience. If 
an author has really felt what he has written, if 
what he sets down has been actual to him in im- 
agination, whether actual in experience or not, 
readers recognize this, and receive his work, so 
that it lives. If he has affected a feeling, if he 
has shammed emotion, the whole is sure to ring 
false, and the world soon tires of his writings. 
Immediate popular judgment of a book is pretty { 
generally wrong ; ultimate general estimate is in- 
variably correct. Humanity knows the truth of 
human feeling ; and while it may be fooled for a 
time, it comes to the truth at last, in act if not in 
theory. The general public is guided by the wise 
few, and it does not reason out the difference be- 
tween the genuine and the imitation ; but it will 
in the end save the real, while the sham is forgot- 
ten through utter neglect. 

Even where an author has seemingly persuaded 
himself that his pretended emotions are real, he 
cannot permanently deceive the world. You may 
remember the chapter in Aldrich's delightful 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 11 

" Story of a Bad Boy " which relates how Tom 
Bailey, being crossed in love at the mature age of 
fourteen, deliberately became a "blighted being;" 
how he neglected his hair, avoided his playmates, 
made a point of having a poor appetite, and went 
mooning about forsaken graveyards, endeavoring 
to fix his thoughts upon death and self-destruc- 
tion; how entirely the whole matter was a hum- 
bug, and yet how sincere the boy was in supposing 
himself to be unutterably melancholy. " It was a 
great comfort," he says, " to be so perfectly mis- 
erable and yet not to suffer any. I used to look in 
the glass and gloat over the amount and variety 
of mournful expression I could throw into my fea- 
tures. If I caught myself smiling at anything, I 
cut the smile short with a sigh. The oddest thing 
about all this is, I never once suspected that I was 
not unhappy. No one . . . was more deceived 
than I." We have all of us had experiences of 
this kind, and I fancy that there are few writers 
who cannot look back to a stage in their career 
when they thought that it was a prime essential 
of authorship to believe themselves to feel things 
which they did not feel in the least. This sort of 
self-deception is characteristic of a whole school of 
writers, of whom Byron was in his day a typical 
example. There is no doubt that Byron, greatly 
gifted as he was, took his mooning melancholy 
with monstrous seriousness when he began to 
write it, and the public received it with equal 
gravity. Yet Byron's mysterious misery, his im- 
measurable wickedness, his misanthropy too great 



12 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

for words, were mere affectations, — stage tricks 
which appealed to the gallery. Nobody is moved 
by them now. The fact that the poet himself 
thought that he believed in them could not save 
them. Byron had other and nobler qualities which 
make his best work endure, but it is in spite of his 
Bad-Boy-ish pose as a " blighted being." The fact 
is that sooner or later time tries all art by the tests 
of truth and common sense, and nothing which is 
not genuine is able to endure this proving. 

To be literature a work must express sincere 
emotion ; but how is feeling which is genuine to 
be distinguished from that which is affected ? All 
that has been said must be regarded as simply 
theoretical and of very little practical interest un- 
less there be some criterion by which this ques- 
tion may be settled. Manifestly we cannot so far 
enter into the consciousness of the writer as to 
tell whether he does or does not feel what he ex- 
presses ; it can be only from outward signs that 
we judge whether his imagination has first made 
real to him what he undertakes to make real for 
others. 

Something may be judged by the amount of 
seriousness with which a thing is written. The 
air of sincerity which is inevitable in the genuine 
is most difficult to counterfeit. What a man really 
feels he writes with a certain earnestness which 
may seem indefinite, but which is sufficiently tan- 
gible in its effects upon the reader. More than 
by any other single influence mankind has in all 
its history been more affected by the contagion of 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 13 

belief; and it is not easy to exaggerate the sus- 
ceptibility of humanity to this force. Vague and 
elusive as this test of the genuineness of emotion 
might seem, it is in reality capable of much prac- 
tical application. We have no trouble in decid- 
ing that the conventional rhymes which fill the 
corners of the newspapers are not the product of 
genuine inner stress. We are too well acquainted 
with these time - draggled rhymes of "love" and 
"dove," of "darts" and "hearts," of "woe" and 
"throe;" we have encountered too often these 
pretty, petty fancies, these twilight musings and 
midnight moans, this mild melancholy and maud- 
lin sentimentality. We have only to read these 
trig little bunches of verse, tied up, as it were, 
with sad-colored ribbons, to feel their artificiality. 
On the other hand, it is impossible to read " Helen 
of Rirconnel," or Browning's " Prospice," or 
Wordsworth's poems to Lucy, without being sure 
that the poet meant that which he said in his song 
with all the fervor of heart and imagination. A 
reader need not be very critical to feel that the 
novels of the " Duchess " and her tribe are made 
by a process as mechanical as that of making 
paper flowers ; he will not be able to advance far 
in literary judgment without coming to suspect 
that fiction like the pleasant pot-boilers of William 
Black and W. Clark Russell, if hand-made, is yet 
manufactured according to an arbitrary pattern ; 
but what reader can fail to feel that to Hawthorne 
"The Scarlet Letter" was utterly true, that to 
Thackeray Colonel Newcome was a creature warm 



14 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

with human blood and alive with a vigorous hu- 
manity? Theoretically we may doubt our power 
to judge of the sincerity of an author, but we do 
not find this so impossible practically. 

Critics sometimes say of a book that it is or is 
not " convincing." What they mean is that the 
author has or has not been able to make what he 
has written seem true to the imagination of the 
reader. The man who in daily life attempts to act 
a part is pretty sure sooner or later to betray him- 
self to the observant eye. His real self will shape 
the disguise under which he has hidden it; he may 
hold out the hands and say the words of Esau, but 
the voice with which he speaks will perforce be the 
voice of Jacob. It is so in literature, and especially 
in literature which arouses the perceptions by an 
appeal to the imagination. The writer must be in ,. 
earnest himself or he cannot convince the reader. \ 
To the man who invents a fiction, for instance, the \ 
story which he has devised must in his imagination 
be profoundly true or it will not be true to the 
audience which he addresses. To the novelist who is 
"convincing," his characters are as real as the men 
he meets in his walks or sits beside at table. It 
is for this reason that every novelist with imagina- 
tion is likely to find that the fictitious personages 
of his story seem to act independently of the will of 
the author. They are so real that they must follow 
out the laws of their character, although that char- 
acter exists only in imagination. For the author 
to feel this verity in what he writes is of course not 
all that is needed to enable him to convince his 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 15 

public ; but it is certain that he is helpless without 
it, and that he cannot make real to others what is 
not real to himself. 

In emotion we express the difference between j 
the genuine and the counterfeit by the words " sen- / 
timent " and " sentimentality." Sentiment is what 
a man really feels ; sentimentality is what he per- 
suades himself that he feels. The Bad Boy as a 
" blighted being " is the type of sentimentalists for 
all time. There is about the same relation between 
sentimentality and sentiment that there is between 
a paper doll and the lovely girl that it represents. 
There are fashions in emotions as there are fash- 
ions in bonnets ; and foolish mortals are as prone 
to follow one as another. It is no more difficult 
for persons of a certain quality of mind to per- 
suade themselves that they thrill with what they 
conceive to be the proper emotion than it is for a 
woman to convince herself of the especial fitness 
to her face of the latest device in utterly unbecom- 
ing headgear. Our grandmothers felt that proper 
maidenly sensibility required them to be so deeply 
moved by tales of broken hearts and unrequited 
affection that they must escape from the too poig- 
nant anguish by fainting into the arms of the near- 
est man. Their grandchildren to-day are neither 
more nor less sincere, neither less nor more sensi- 
ble in following to extremes other emotional modes 
which it might be invidious to specify. Sentimen- 
tality will not cease while the power of self-decep- 
tion remains to human beings. 

With sentimentality genuine literature has no 



16 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

more to do than it has with other human weak- 
nesses and vices, which it may picture but must not 
share. With sentiment it is concerned in every 
line. Of sentiment no composition can have too 
much ; of sentimentality it has more than enough 
if there be but the trace shown in a single affecta- 
tion of phrase, in one unmeaning syllable or unne- 
cessary accent. 

There are other tests of the genuineness of the 
emotion expressed in literature which are more 
tangible than those just given ; and being more 
tangible they are more easily applied. I have said 
that sham sentiment is sure to ring false. This is 
largely due to the fact that it is inevitably incon- 
sistent. Just as a man has no difficulty in acting 
out his own character, whereas in any part that is 
assumed there are sure sooner or later to be lapses 
and incongruities, so genuine emotion will be con- 
sistent because it is real, while that which is feigned 
will almost surely jar upon itself. The fictitious 
personage that the novelist actually shapes in his 
imagination, that is more real to him than if it 
stood by Ins side in solid flesh, must be consistent 
with itself because it is in the mind of its creator 
a living entity. It may not to the reader seem 
winning or even human, but it will be a unit in 
its conception and its expression, a complete and 
consistent whole. The poem which comes molten 
from the furnace of the imagination will be a sin- 
gle thing, not a collection of verses more or less 
ingeniously dovetailed together. The work which 
has been felt as a whole, which has been grasped 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 17 

as a whole, which has as a whole been lived by 
that inner self which is the only true producer of 
art, will be so consistent, so unified, so closely knit, 
that the reader cannot conceive of it as being built 
up of fortuitous parts, or as existing at all except 
in the beautiful completeness which genius has 
given it. 

What I mean may perhaps be more clear to you 
if you take any of the little tinkling rhymes which 
abound, and examine them critically. Even some 
of more merit easily afford example. Take that 
pleasant rhyme so popular in the youth of our fa- 
thers, " The Old Oaken Bucket," and see how one 
stanza or another might be lost without being 
missed, how one thought or another has obviously 
been put in for the rhyme or to fill out the verse, 
and how the author seems throughout always to 
have been obliged to consider what he might say 
next, putting his work together as a joiner matches 
boards for a table-top. Contrast this with the ab- 
solute unity of Wordsworth's " Daffodils," Keats' 
" Ode to a Grecian Urn," Shelley's " Stanzas 
Written in Dejection," or any really great lyric. 
You will perceive the difference better than any 
one can say it. It is true that the quality of which 
we are speaking is sufficiently subtile to make ex- 
amples unsatisfactory and perhaps even dangerous ; 
but it seems to me that it is not too much to say 
that any careful and intelligent reader will find 
little difficulty in feeling the unity of the master- 
pieces of literature. 

This lack of consistency is most easily appreci- 



18 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ated, perhaps, in the drawing of character. Those 
modern writers who look upon literature as having 
two functions, first, to advance extravagant theo- 
ries, and second, — and more important, — to ad- 
vertise the author, are constantly putting forward 
personages that are so inconsistent that it is impos- 
sible not to see that they are mere embodied argu- 
ments or sensationalism incarnate, and not in the 
least creatures of a strong and wholesome imagina- 
tion. When in " The Doll's House " Ibsen makes 
Nora Helma an inconsequent, frivolous, childish 
puppet, destitute alike of moral and of common 
sense, and then in the twinkling of an eye trans- 
forms her into an indignant woman, full of moral 
purpose, furnished not only with a complete set of 
advanced views but with an entire battery of mod- 
ern arguments with which to support them, — when, 
in a word, the author, for the sake of his theory, 
works a visible miracle, we cease to believe in his 
imaginative sincerity. We know that he is dog- 
matizing, not creating ; that this is artifice, not art. 
Another test of the genuineness of what is ex- 
pressed in literature is its truth to life. Here 
again we tread upon ground somewhat uncertain, 
since truth is as elusive as a sunbeam, and to no 
two human beings the same. Yet while the mean- 
ing of life is not the same to any two who walk 
under the heavens, there are certain broad princi- 
ples which all men recognize. The eternal facts of 
life and of death, of love and of hate, the instinct 
of self-preservation, the fear of pain, the respect 
for courage, and the enthrallment of passion, — 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 19 

these are laws of humanity so universal that we 
assume them to be known to all mankind. We 
cannot believe that any mortal can find that true 
to his imagination which ignores these unvarying 
conditions of human existence. He who writes 
what is untrue to humanity cannot persuade us 
that he writes what is true to himself. We are 
sure that those impossible heroes of Ouida, with 
their superhuman accomplishments, those heroines 
of beauty transcendently incompatible with their 
corrupt hearts, base lives, and entire defiance of all 
sanitary laws, were no more real to their author 
than they are to us. Conviction springs from the 
imagination, and imagination is above all else the 
realizing faculty. It is idle to say that a writer 
imagines every extravagant and impossible whimsy 
which comes into his head. He imagines those 
things, and those things only, which are real to his 
inner being ; so that in judging literature the ques- 
tion to be settled is: Does this thing which the 
author tells, this emotion which he expresses, im- 
press us as having been to him when he wrote ac- 
tual, true, and absolutely real ? To unimaginative 
persons it might seem that I am uttering nonsense. 
Jtjs not possible for a man without imagination to 
see how things which are invented by the mind 
should by that same mind, in all sanity, be received 
as real. Yet that is precisely what happens. No 
one, I believe, produces real or permanent litera- 
ture who is not capable of performing this miracle ; 
who does not feel to be true that which has no 
other being, no other place, no other significance 



20 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

save that which it derives from the creative power 
of his own inner sense, working upon the material 
furnished by his perception of the world around 
him. This is the daily miracle of genius ; but it 
is a miracle shared to some extent by every mortal 
who has the faintest glimmer of genuine imagi- 
nation. 

To be convincing literature must express emo- 
tion which is genuine ; to commend itself to the 
best sense of mankind, and thus to take its place 
in the front rank, it must deal with emotion which 
is wholesome and normal. A work phrasing mor- 
bid emotion may be art, and it may be lasting; 
but it is not the highest art, and it does not ap- 
prove itself to the best and sanest taste. Mankind 
looks to literature for the expression of genuine, 
strong, healthy human emotion ; emotion passion- 
ate, tragic, painful, the exhilaration of joy or the 
frenzy of grief, as it may be ; but always the emo- 
tion which under the given conditions would be 
felt by the healthy heart and soul, by the virile 
man and the womanly woman. No amount of in- 
sane power flashing here and there amid the foul- 
ness of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata," can reconcile 
the world to the fact that the book embodies the 
broodings of a mind morbid and diseased. Even 
to concede that the author of such a work had 
genius could not avail to conceal the fact that his 
muse was smitten from head to feet with the un- 
speakable corruption of leprosy. Morbid litera- 
ture may produce a profound sensation, but it is 
incapable of creating a permanent impression. 



WHAT LITERATURE IS 21 

The principles of which we are speaking are 
strikingly illustrated in the tales of Edgar Allan 
Poe. He was possessed of an imagination narrow, 
but keen ; uncertain and wayward, but alert and 
swift; individual and original, though unhappily 
lacking any ethical stability. In his best work 
he is sincere and convincing, so that stories like 
" The Cask of Amontillado," " The Gold Bug," or 
"The Purloined Letter," are permanently effect- 
ive, each in its way and degree. Poe's master- 
piece, " The Fall of the House of Usher," is a 
study of morbid character, but it is saved by the 
fact that this is viewed in its effect upon a healthy 
nature. The reader looks at everything through 
the mind of the imaginary narrator, so that the 
ultimate effect is that of an exhibition of the 
feelings of a wholesome nature brought into con- 
tact with madness ; although even so the ordinary 
reader is still repelled by the abnormal elements 
of the theme. There is in all the work of Poe a 
good deal that is fantastic and not a little that is 
affected. He is rarely entirely sincere and sane. 
He shared with Byron an instinctive fondness for 
the role of a" blighted being," and a halo of ine- 
briety too often encircles his head ; yet at his best 
he moves us by the mysterious and incommuni- 
cable power of genius. Many of his tales, on the 
other hand, are mere mechanical tasks, and as 
such neither convincing nor permanent. There is 
a great deal of Poe which is not worth anybody's 
reading because he did not believe it, did not 
imagine it as real, when he wrote it. Other stories 



22 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

of his illustrate the futility of self-deception on 
the part of the author. " Lygeia " Poe always 
announced as his masterpiece. He apparently per- 
suaded himself that he felt its turgid sentimental- 
ity, that he thrilled at its elaborately theatrical 
setting, and he flattered himself that he could 
cheat the world as he had cheated himself. Yet 
the reader is not fooled. Every man of judgment 
realizes that, however the author was able to de- 
ceive himself, " Lygeia " is rubbish, and sopho- 
moric rubbish at that. 

There has probably never before been a time 
which afforded so abundant illustrations of morbid 
work as to-day. We shall have occasion later to 
speak of Yerlaine, Zola, Ibsen, and the rest, with 
their prurient prose and putrescent poetry ; and 
here it is enough to note that the diseased and the 
morbid are by definition excluded from literature 
in the best sense of the word. Good art is not 
only sincere ; it is human, and wholesome, and 
sound. 



n 

LITEEAKY EXPKESSION 

So much, then, for what literature must express ; 
it is well now to examine for a little the manner 
of expression. To feel genuine emotion is not all 
that is required of a writer. Among artists can- 
not be reckoned 

One born with poet's heart in sad eclipse 

Because unmatched with poet's tongue ; 
Whose song impassioned struggles to his lips, 
Yet dies, alas ! unsung. 

He must be able to sing the song; to make the 
reader share the throbbing of his heart. All men 
feel ; the artist is he who can by the use of con- 
ventions impart his feelings to the world. The 
musician uses conventions of sound, the painter 
conventions of color, the sculptor conventions of 
form, and the writer must employ the means most 
artificial of all, the conventions of language. 

Here might be considered, if there were space, 
the whole subject of artistic technique ; but it is 
sufficient for our purposes to notice that the test 
of technical excellence is the completeness with 
which the means are adapted to the end sought. 
The crucial question in regard to artistic work- 
manship is : " Does it faithfully and fully convey 



24 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the emotion which is the essence of the work?" 
A work of art must make itself felt as well as in- 
tellectually understood ; it must reach the heart as 
well as the brain. If a picture, a statue, a piece 
of music, or a poem provokes your admiration 
without touching your sensibilities, there is some- 
thing radically wrong with the work — or with 
you. 

First of all, then, expression must be adequate. 
If it is slovenly, incomplete, unskillful, it fails to 
impart the emotion which is its purpose. We 
have all sat down seething with excitement and 
endeavored to get our feelings upon paper, only 
to discover that our command of ourselves and of 
technical means was not sufficient to allow us to 
phrase adequately that which yet we felt most sin- 
cerely. It is true that style is in a sense a sub- 
ordinate matter, but it is none the less an essential 
one. It is manifestly of little consequence to the 
world what one has to say if one cannot say it. 
"We cannot be thrilled by the song which the dumb 
would sing had he but voice. 

Yet it is necessary to remember that although 
expression must be adequate, it must also be sub- 
ordinate. It is a means and not an end, and the 
least suspicion of its having been put first destroys 
our sense of the reality of the feeling it embodies. 
If an actress in moments of impassioned declama- 
tion is detected arranging her draperies, her art 
no longer carries conviction. Nobody feeling the 
heart - swelling words of Queen Katharine, for 
instance, could while speaking them be openly 



LITERARY EXPRESSION 25 

concerned about the effective disposition of her 
petticoats. The reader of too intricate and elab- 
orate verse, such as the French forms of triolet, 
rondeau, rondel, and so on, has an instinctive per- 
ception that a poet whose attention was taken up 
with the involved and artfully difficult versifica- 
tion could not have been experiencing any deep 
passion, no matter how strongly the verse protests 
that he has. Expression obviously artful instantly 
arouses suspicion that it has been wrought for its 
own sake only. 

Technical excellence which displays the clever- 
ness of the artist rather than imparts the emotion 
which is its object, defeats its own end. A book 
so elaborated that we feel that the author was ab- 
sorbed in perfection of expression rather than in 
what he had to express leaves us cold and un- 
moved, if it does not tire us. The messenger has 
usurped the attention which belonged to the mes- 
sage. It is not impossible that I shall offend some 
of you when I say that Walter Pater's " Marius 
the Epicurean " seems to me a typical example of 
this sort of book. The author has expended his 
energies in exquisite excesses of language ; he has 
refined his style until it has become artfully inani- 
mate. It is like one of the beautiful glass flowers 
in the Harvard Museum. It is not a living rose. 
It is no longer a message spoken to the heart of 
mankind ; it is a brilliant exercise in technique. 

Literature, then, is genuine emotion, adequately 
expressed. To be genuine it must come from 
the imagination ; and adequate expression is that 



26 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

which in turn reaches the imagination. If it were 
not that the phrase seems forbiddingly cumber- 
some, we might, indeed, define literature as being 
such writings as are able to arouse emotion by an 
appeal to the imagination. 

A sensational story, what the English call a 
" penny dreadful " or a " shilling shocker " accord- 
ing to the cost of the bundle of cheap excitement, 
may be an appeal to the emotions, but it aims to 
act upon the senses or the nerves. Its endeavor is 
to work by the grossest and most palpable means. 
It is an assault, so to say, upon the perceptions. 
Books of this sort have nothing to do with imagi- 
nation, either in reader or writer. They would be 
ruled out by all the tests which we have given, 
since they are not sincere, not convincing, not con- 
sistent, not true to life. 

One step higher in the scale come romances of 
abounding fancy, of which " She " may serve as 
an example. They are clever feats of intellectual 
jugglery, and it is to the intellectual perceptions 
that they appeal. Not, it is true, to the intellect 
in its loftiest moods, but the understanding as dis- 
tinguished from the feeling. No reader is really 
moved by them. The ingenuity of the author 
amuses and absorbs the attention. The dexterity 
and unexpectedness of the tale excite and enter- 
tain. The pleasure experienced in reading these 
books is not far removed from that experienced in 
seeing a clever contortionist. To read them is 
like going to the circus, — a pleasant diversion, and 
one not without a certain importance to this over- 



LITERARY EXPRESSION 27 

wrought generation. It is amusement, although 
not of a high grade. 

Do not suppose, however, that I am saying that 
a story cannot have an exciting plot and yet be 
literature. In the restricted sense in which these 
lectures take the term, I should say that " The 
Adventures of Captain Horn," an agreeable book 
which has been widely read of late, is not litera- 
ture ; and yet " Treasure Island," upon which per- 
haps to some extent the former was modeled, most 
certainly is literature. The difference is that while 
Stockton in " Captain Horn " has worked with 
clever ingenuity to entertain, Stevenson in " Treas- 
ure Island " so vividly imagined what he wrote 
that he has made his characters human, informed 
every page with genuine feeling, and produced a 
romance permanently vital. The plot of those su- 
perb masterpieces of adventure, the " D' Artagnan 
Romances," is as wild, perhaps as extravagant, as 
that of the marrow-curdling tales which make the 
fortunes of sensational papers ; but to the excite- 
ment of adventure is added that unification, that 
humanization, that perfection of imaginative real- 
ism which mark Dumas as a genius. 

The difference of effect between books which 
are not literature and those which are is that while 
these amuse, entertain, glance over the surface of 
the mind, those touch the deepest springs of being. 
They touch us aesthetically, it is true. The emo- 
tion aroused is impersonal, and thus removed from 
the keen thrill which is born of actual experiences ; 
but it depends upon the same passions, the same 



28 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

characteristics, the same humanity, that underlie 
the joys and sorrows of real life. It is because we 
are capable of passion and of disappointment that 
we are moved by the love and anguish of Romeo 
and Juliet, of Francesca and Paolo. Our emotion 
is not identical with that with which the heart 
throbs in personal love and grief ; yet art which 
is genuine awakes emotion thoroughly genuine. 
Books of sensationalism and sentimentality may 
excite curiosity, or wonder, or amusement, or sham 
feeling ; but they must have at least some spark of 
sacred fire before they can arouse in the intelligent 
reader this inner throb of real feeling. 

The personal equation must be considered here. 
The same book must affect different readers dif- 
ferently. From the sentimental maid who weeps 
in the kitchen over " The Seventy Sorrows of 
Madelaine the Broken-hearted," to her master in 
his library, touched by the grief of King Lear, is 
indeed a far cry; and yet both may be deeply 
moved. It may be asked whether we have arrived 
at a standard which will enable us to judge be- 
tween them. 

The matter is perhaps to be cleared up some- 
what by a little common sense. It is not hard to 
decide whether the kitchen-maid in question has 
an imagination sufficiently well developed to bring 
her within the legitimate grounds of inquiry ; and 
the fiction which delights her rudimentary under- 
standing is easily ruled out. It is not so easy, 
however, to dispose of this point entirely. There 
is always a border-land concerning which doubts 



LITERARY EXPRESSION 29 

and disagreements must continue to exist. In all 
matters connected with the feelings it is necessary 
to recognize the fact that the practical is not likely 
to accord fully with the theoretical. We define 
literature only to be brought face to face with the 
difficulty which is universal in art, the difficulty 
of degree. No book will answer, it may be, to a 
theoretical definition, no work conform completely 
to required conditions. The composition which is 
a masterpiece stands at one end of the list, and 
comes so near to the ideal that there is no doubt of 
its place. At the other end there is the rubbish, 
equally unquestioned in its worthlessness. The 
troublesome thing is to decide where between 
comes the dividing line above which is literature. 
We call a ring or a coin gold, knowing that it 
contains a mixture of alloy. The goldsmith may 
have a standard, and refuse the name gold to any 
mixture into which enters a given per cent of 
baser metal ; but in art this is impossible. Here 
each reader must decide for himself. Whether 
works which lie near the line are to be considered 
literature is a question to be decided individually. 
Each reader is justified in making his own deci- 
sion, provided only that he found it upon definite 
principles. It is largely a question what is one's 
own responsiveness to literature. There are those 
to whom Tolstoi's " War and Peace " is a work of 
greatness, while others fail to find it anything but 
a chaotic and unorganized note-book of a genius 
not self -responsible. " John Inglesant " appeals 
to many persons of excellent taste as a novel of 



30 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

permanent beauty, while to some it seems senti- 
mental and artificial. Mr. Lowell and others have 
regarded Sylvester Judd's " Margaret " as one of 
the classics of American fiction ; yet it has never 
appealed to the general public, and an eminent lit- 
erary man told me not long ago that he finds it 
dull. To these and to all other varying opinions 
there is but one thing to be said : Any man has a 
right to his judgment if it is founded upon the logi- 
cal application of definite principles. Any opinion 
which is sincere and based upon standards must 
be treated with respect, whether it is agreed with 
or not. 

It is difficult, on the other hand, to feel that 
there is any moral excuse for prejudices which 
are the result of individual whims rather than of 
deliberate judgment. An opinion should not be 
some burr caught up by the garments unawares; 
but a fruit carefully selected as the best on the 
tree. The fact is that the effort of forming an in- 
telligent judgment is more severe than most per- 
sons care to undertake unless absolutely forced to 
it. It sometimes seems as if the whole tendency 
of modern life were in the direction of cultivating 
mental dexterity until the need of also learning 
mental concentration is in danger of being over- 
looked. Men are trained to meet intellectual emer- 
gencies, but not to endure continued intellectual 
strain. The difficulty which is to be conquered by 
a sudden effort they are able to overcome, but 
when deliberation and continuous mental achieve- 
ment are required, the weakness of their training 



LITERARY EXPRESSION 31 

is manifest. The men, and perhaps still more the 
women, of to-day are ready to decide upon the 
merits of a book in the twinkling of an eye ; and 
it is to be acknowledged that these snap judgments 
are reasonable far more often than could have 
been expected. When it comes, however, to hav- 
ing a reason for the faith that is in them, it is 
lamentable how many intelligent persons prove 
utterly incapable of fairly and logically examining 
literature ; and it must be conceded that there 
should be some other test by which to decide 
whether a book is to be included under the gra- 
cious name of literature than the dogmatic asser- 
tion : " Well, I don't care what anybody says 
against it ; I like it ! " 

We have discussed the distinctions by which it 
may be decided what is to be considered litera- 
ture ; and, did space warrant, we might go on to 
examine the principles which determine the rank 
of work. They are of course largely to be in- 
ferred from what has been said already. The 
merit of literature will be chiefly dependent upon 
the closeness with which it conforms to the rules 
which mark the nature of literature. The more 
fully genuine its emotion, the more adequate its ex- 
pression, the higher the scale in which a book is 
to be placed. The more sane and healthful, the 
more entirely in accord with the needs and springs 
of general human life, the greater the work. In- 
deed, beyond this there is little to say save that 
the nobility of intention, the ethical significance of 



32 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the emotion embodied, mark the worth and the rank 
of a composition. 

I have tried to define literature, and yet in the 
end my strongest feeling is that of the inadequacy 
of my definition. He would be but a lukewarm 
lover who was capable of framing a description 
which would appear to him to embody fully the 
perfections of his mistress ; and art is a mistress 
so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can 
fitly characterize her, no service can be wholly 
worthy of her. Life is full of disappointment, and 
pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility in 
which all these evils are summed up ; and yet even 
were there no other alleviation, he who knows and 
truly loves literature finds here a sufficient reason 
to be glad that he lives. Science may show man 
how to live ; art makes living worth his while. 
Existence to-day without literature would be a 
failure and a despair ; and if we cannot satisfacto- 
rily define our art, we at least are aware how it en- 
riches and ennobles the life of every human being 
who comes within the sphere of its wide and gra- 
cious influence. 



Ill 

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

When it is clearly understood what literature 
is, there may still remain a good deal of vagueness 
in regard to the study of it. It is by no means 
sufficient for intellectual development that one 
have a misty general share in the conventional 
respect traditionally felt for such study. There 
should be a clear and accurate comprehension why 
the study of literature is worth the serious atten- 
tion of earnest men and women. 

It might at first thought seem that of this ques- 
tion no discussion is needed. It is generally as- 
sumed that the entire matter is sufficiently obvi- 
ous, and that this is all that there is to it. The 
obvious, however, is often the last to be perceived ; 
and such is the delusiveness of human nature that 
to call a thing too plain to need demonstration is 
often but a method of concealing inability to 
prove. Men are apt to fail to perceive what lies 
nearest to them, while to cover their blindness and 
ignorance they are ready to accept without rea- 
soning almost any assumption which comes well 
recommended. The demand for patent medicines, 
wide-spread as it is, is insignificant in comparison 
to the demand for ready-made opinions. Most 



34 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

men accept the general belief, and do not trouble 
themselves to make it really theirs by examining 
the grounds upon which it is based. We all agree 
that it is well to study literature, it is probable ; 
but it is to be feared that those of us who can say 
exactly why it is well do not form a majority. 

The word " study," it may be remarked in pass- 
ing, is not an entirely happy one in this connec- 
tion. It has, it is true, many delightful associa- 
tions, especially for those who have really learned 
how to study ; but it has, too, a certain doleful 
suggestiveness which calls up painful memories of 
childhood. It is apt to bring to mind bitter hours 
when some example in long division stood like an 
impassable wall between us and all happiness ; 
when complex fractions deprived life of all joy, or 
the future was hopelessly blurred by being seen 
through a mist of tears and irregular French verbs. 
The word " study " is therefore likely to seem to 
indicate a mechanical process, full of weariness 
and vexation of spirit. This is actually true of no 
study which is worthy of the name ; and least of 
all is it true in connection with art. The word as 
applied to literature is not far from meaning in- 
telligent enjoyment ; it signifies not only apprehen- 
sion but comprehension ; it denotes not so much 
accumulation as assimilation ; it is not so much 
acquirement as appreciation. 

By the study of literature can be meant nothing 
pedantic, nothing formal, nothing artificial. I 
should like to call the subject of these talks " Ex- 
periencing Literature," if the verb could be re- 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 35 

ceived in the same sense as in the old-fashioned 
phrase " experiencing religion." That is what I 
mean. The study of literature is neither less nor 
more than experiencing literature, — the taking it 
to heart and the getting to its heart. 

To most persons to study literature means no- 
thing more than to read. There is, it is true, a 
vague general notion that it is the reading of some 
particular class of books, not always over clearly 
denned. It is not popularly supposed that the 
reading of an ordinary newspaper is part of the 
study of literature ; while on the other hand there 
are few persons who can imagine that the perusal 
of Shakespeare, however casual, can be anything 
else. Since literary art is in the form of written 
works, reading is of course essential ; but by study 
we mean something more grave and more fruit- 
ful than the mere surface acquaintance with books, 
no matter how high in the scale of excellence 
these may be. 

The study of literature, in the true signification 
of the phrase, is that act by which the learner 
gets into the attitude of mind which enables him 
to enter into that creative thought which is the 
soul of every real book. It is easily possible, as 
every reader knows, to read without getting below 
the surface ; to take a certain amount of intellect- 
ual account of that which we skim ; to occupy with 
it the attention, and yet not to be at all in the 
mood which is indispensable for proper comprehen- 
sion. It is this which makes it possible for the 
young girl of the present day to read novels which 



36 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

her more sophisticated brothers cannot look at 
without blushing to see them in her hands — at 
least, we hope that it is this ! We all have mo- 
ments when from mental weariness, indifference, 
indolence, or abstraction, we slide over the pages 
as a skater goes over the ice, never for a moment 
having so much as a glimpse of what is hidden be- 
neath the surface. This is not the thing about 
which we are talking. We mean by study the , 
making our own all that is contained in the books I 
which we read ; and not only all that is said, but 
still more all that is suggested ; all that is to be 
learned, but above everything all that is to be felt. 

The object of the study of literature is always a j 
means and not an end, and yet in the development 
of the mind no means can fulfill its purpose which 
is not an enjoyment. Goethe has said : " Woe to 
that culture which points man always to an end, 
instead of making him happy by the way." No 
study is of any high value which is not a delight 
in itself; and equally, no study is of value which 
is pursued simply for itself. Every teacher knows 
how futile is work in which the pupil is not inter- 
ested, — in other words, which is not a pleasure to 
him. The mind finds delight in all genuine activ- 
ity and acquirement; and the student must take 
pleasure in his work or he is learning little. Some 
formal or superficial knowledge he may of course 
accumulate. The learning of the multiplication 
table is not to be set aside as useless because it 
is seldom accompanied by thrills of passionate en- 
joyment. There must be some drudgery in edu- 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 37 

cation ; but at least what I have said certainly 
holds good in all that relates to the deeper and 
higher development of the mind. 

The study of literature, then, is both a duty and 
a delight ; a pleasure in itself and a help toward 
what is better. By it one approaches the compre- 
hension of those books which are to be ranked as 
works of art. By it one endeavors to fit himself 
to enter into communication with the great minds 
and the great imaginations of mankind. What we 
gain in this may be broadly classified as pleasure, 
social culture, and a knowledge of life. Any one 
of these terms might almost be made to include 
the other two, but the division here is convenient 
in discussion. 

Pleasure in its more obvious meaning is the 
most superficial, although the most evident, gain 
from art. In its simplest form this is mere amuse- 
ment and recreation. We read, we say, " to pass 
the time." There are in life hours which need to 
be beguiled ; times when we are unequal to the fa- 
tigue or the worry of original thought, or when 
some present reality is too painful to be faced. In 
these seasons we desire to be delivered from self, 
and the self-forgetfulness and the entertainment 
that we find in books are of unspeakable relief 
and value. This is of course a truism ; but it was 
never before so insistently true as it is to-day. 
Life has become so busy, it is in a key so high, 
so nervously exhaustive, that the need of amuse- 
ment, of recreation which shall be a relief from 
the severe nervous and mental strain, has become 



38 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

most pressing. The advance of science and civi- 
lization has involved mankind in a turmoil of mul- 
titudinous and absorbing interests from the pres- 
sure of which there seems to us no escape except 
in self-oblivion ; and the most obvious use of read- 
ing is to minister to this end. 

At the risk of being tedious it is necessary to 
remark in passing that herein lies a danger not to 
be passed over lightly. There is steadily increas- 
ing the tendency to treat literature as if it had no 
other function than to amuse. There is too much 
reading which is like opium-eating or dram-drink- 
ing. It is one thing to amuse one's self to live, 
and quite another to live to amuse one's self. It 
is universally conceded, I believe, that the intel- 
lect is higher than the body; and I cannot see 
why it does not follow that intellectual debauch- 
ery is more vicious than physical. Certainly it is 
difficult to see why the man who neglects his intel- 
lect while caring scrupulously for his body is on a 
higher moral plane than the man who, though he 
neglect or drug his body, does cultivate his mind. 

In an entirely legitimate fashion, however, books 
may be read simply for amusement ; and greatly 
is he to be pitied who is not able to lose himself in 
the enchantments of books. A physical cripple is 
hardly so sorrowful an object. Everybody knows 
the remark attributed to Talleyrand, , who is said 
to have answered a man who boasted that he had 
never learned whist : " What a miserable old age 
you are preparing for yourself." A hundredfold 
is it true that he who does not early cultivate the 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 39 

habit of reading is neglecting to prepare a resource 
for the days when he shall be past active life. 
While one is in the strength of youth or manhood 
it is possible to fill the mind with interests of activ- 
ity. As long as one is engaged in affairs directly 
the need of the solace of books is less evident and 
less pressing. It is difficult to think without pro- 
found pity of the aged man or woman shut off 
from all important participation in the work or the 
pleasure of the world, if the vicarious enjoyment of 
human interests through literature be also lacking. 
It is amazing how little this fact is realized or in- 
sisted upon. There is no lack of advice to the 
young to provide for the material comfort of their 
age, but it is to be doubted whether the counsel to 
prepare for their intellectual comfort is not the 
more important. Reading is the garden of joy to 
youth, but for age it is a house of refuge. 

The second object which one may have in read- 
ing is that of social cultivation. It is hardly 
necessary to remark how large a part books play 
in modern conversation, or how much one may add 
to one's conversational resources by judicious read- 
ing. It is true that not a little of the modern talk 
about books is of a quality to make the genuine 
lover of literature mingle a smile with a sigh. It is 
the result not of reading literature, so much as of 
reading about literature. It is said that Boston cul- 
ture is simply diluted extract of " Littell's Living 
Age ;" and in the same spirit it might be asserted 
that much modern talk about books is the extract 



40 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

of newspaper condensations of prefaces. The tale 
is told of the thrifty paupers of a Scotch alms- 
house that the aristocrats among them who had 
friends to give them tea would steep and re-steep 
the precious herb, then dry the leaves, and sell 
them to the next grade of inmates. These in turn, 
after use, dried the much-boiled leaves once again, 
and sold them to the aged men to be ground up 
into a sort of false snuff with which the poor crea- 
tures managed to cheat into feeble semblance of 
joy their withered nostrils. I have in my time 
heard not a little so-called literary conversation 
which seemed to me to have gone to the last of 
these processes, and to be a very poor quality of 
thrice-steeped tea-leaf snuff ! Indeed, it must be 
admitted that in general society book talk is often 
confined to chatter about books which had better 
not have been read, and to the retailing of second- 
hand opinions at that. The majority of mankind 
are as fond of getting their ideas as they do their 
household wares, at a bargain counter. It is per- 
haps better to do this than to go without ideas, 
but it is to be borne in mind that on the bargain 
counter one is sure to find only cheap or damaged 
wares. 

Eeal talk about books, however, the expression 
of genuine opinions about real literature, is one 
of the most delightful of social pleasures. It is at 
once an enjoyment and a stimulus. From it one 
gets mental poise, clearness and readiness of ideas, 
and mental breadth. It is so important an element 
in human intercourse that it is difficult to conceive 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 41 

of an ideal friendship into which it does not enter. 
There have been happy marriages between men 
and women lacking in cultivation, but no marriage 
relation can be so harmonious that it may not 
be enriched by a community of literary tastes. A 
wise old gentleman whom I once knew had what 
he called an infallible receipt for happy marriages : 
" Mutual love, a sense of humor, and a liking for 
the same books." Certainly with these a good 
deal else might be overlooked. Personally I have 
much sympathy with the man who is said to have 
claimed a divorce on the ground that his wife did 
not like Shakespeare and would read Ouida. It 
is a serious trial to find the person with whom one 
must live intimately incapable of intellectual talk. 

He who goes into general society at all is ex- 
pected to be able to keep up at least the appearance 
of talking about literature with some degree of in- 
telligence. This is an age in which the opportuni- 
ties for what may be called cosmopolitan knowledge 
are so general that it has come to be the tacit claim 
of any society worth the name that such know- 
ledge shall be possessed by all. I do not, of course, 
mean simply that acquaintance with foreign affairs 
which is to be obtained from the newspapers, even 
all wisdom as set forth in their vexingly voluminous 
Sunday editions. I mean that it is necessary to 
have with the thought of other countries, with their 
customs, and their habits of thought, that famil- 
iarity which is by most to be gained only by gen- 
eral reading. The multiplication of books and the 
modern habit of travel have made an acquaintance 



42 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

with the temper of different peoples a social neces- 
sity almost absolute. 

To a great extent is it also true that modern so- 
ciety expects a knowledge of social conditions and 
aesthetic affairs in the past. This is not so much 
history, formally speaking, as it is the result of a 
certain familiarity with the ways, the habits of 
thought, the manners of bygone folk. Professor 
Barrett Wendell has an admirable phrase : " It is 
only in books that one can travel in time." What 
in the present state of society is expected from the 
accomplished man or woman is that he or she shall 
have traveled in time. He shall have gone back 
into the past in the same sense as far as temper of 
mind is concerned that one goes to Europe ; shall 
have observed from the point of view not of the 
dry historian only, but from that of the student of 
humanity in the broadest sense. It is the human- 
ness of dwellers in distant lands or in other times 
which most interests us ; and it is with this that he 
who would shine in social converse must become 
familiar. 

The position in which a man finds himself who 
in the company of educated men displays ignorance 
of what is important in the past is illustrated by a 
story told of Carlyle. At a dinner of the Royal 
Academy in London, Thackeray and Carlyle were 
guests, and at the table the talk among the artists 
around them turned upon Titian. " One fact about 
Titian," a painter said, " is his glorious coloring." 
" And his glorious drawing is another fact about 
Titian," put in a second. Then one added one 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 43 

thing in praise and another another, until Carlyle 
interrupted them, to say with egotistic emphasis 
and deliberation : " And here sit I, a man made in 
the image of God, who knows nothing about Ti- 
tian, and who cares nothing about Titian ; — and 
that 's another fact about Titian." But Thack- 
eray, who was sipping his claret and listening, 
paused and bowed gravely to his fellow -guest. 
" Pardon me," he said, " that is not a fact about 
Titian. It is a fact — and a very lamentable fact 
— about Thomas Carlyle." Attempts to carry off 
ignorance under the guise of indifference or supe- 
riority are common, but in the end nobody worth 
deceiving is misled by them. 

It is somewhat trite to compare the companion- 
ship of good books to that of intellectual persons, 
and yet the constant repetition of a truth does not 
make it false. To know mankind and to know 
one's self are the great shaping forces which mould 
character. It has too often been said to need to 
be insisted upon at any great length that literature 
may largely represent experience ; but it may fitly 
be added that in reading one is able to choose the 
experiences to which he will be exposed. In life 
we are often surrounded by what is base and igno- 
ble, but this need not happen to us in the library 
unless by our deliberate choice. Emerson aptly 



Go with mean people and you think life is mean. 
Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, 
peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and 
demigods standing around us, who will not let us 
sleep. 



44 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

It so often happens that we are compelled in daily 
life to encounter and to deal with mean people 
that our whole existence would be in great danger 
of becoming hopelessly sordid and mean were it 
not for the blessed company of great minds with 
whom we may hold closest communion through what 
they have written. 

One more point in regard to the social influence 
of reading should be mentioned. Social ease and 
aplomb can of course be gained in no way save 
by actual experience ; but apart from this there is 
nothing else so effective as familiarity with the 
best books. Sympathetic comprehension of litera- 
ture is the experience of life taken vicariously. It 
is living through the consciousness of others, and 
those, moreover, who are the cleverest and most 
far-reaching minds of all time. The mere man of 
books brought into contact with the real world is 
confused and helpless ; but when once the natural 
shyness and bewilderment have worn off, he is able 
to recall and to use the knowledge which he has 
acquired in the study, and rapidly adapts himself 
to any sphere that he may find himself in. I do 
not mean that a man may read himself into social 
grace and ease ; but surely any given man is at a 
very tangible advantage in society for having 
learned from books what society is. 



IV 

WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 

In all that is said in the last chapter we have 
dealt only with the outward and accidental, barely 
touching upon the really significant and deeper 
meanings of our subject. The third object which 
I named, the gaining a knowledge of life, tran- 
scends all others. 

The desire to fathom the meaning of life is the 
most constant and universal of human longings. 
It is practically impossible to conceive of conscious- 
ness separated from the wish to understand self 
and the significance of existence. This atom self- 
hood, sphered about by the infinite spaces of the 
universe, yearns to comprehend what and where it 
is. It sends its thought to the farthest star that 
watches the night, and thence speeds it down the 
unsounded void, to search unweariedly for the an- 
swer of the baffling, insistent riddle of life. What- 
ever man does or dreams, hopes or fears, loves or 
hates, suffers or enjoys, has behind it the eternal 
doubt, the question which man asks of the universe 
with passionate persistence, — the meaning of life. 

Most of all does man seek aid in solving this ab- 
sorbing mystery. Nothing else interests the human 
like the human. The slatternly women leaning 



46 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

out of tenement-house windows and gossiping across 
squalid courts talk of their neighbors. The wisest 
philosopher studies the acts and the thoughts of 
men. In the long range between these extremes 
there is every grade of intelligence and cultivation ; 
and in each it is the doings, the thoughts, most of 
all the feelings, of mankind which elicit the keen- 
est interest. The motto of the Latin playwright is 
in reality the motto of the race : " Nothing human 
is indifferent to me." 

We are all intensely eager to know what are the 
possibilities of humanity. We seek knowledge of 
them as an heir questions searchingly concerning 
the extent of the inheritance which has fallen to 
him. Literature is the inventory of the heritage 
of humanity. Life is but a succession of emotions ; 
and the earnest mind burns with desire to learn 
what emotions are within its possibilities. The 
discoverer of an unsuspected capability of receiving 
delight, the realization of an unknown sensation, 
even of pain, increases by so much the extent of 
the possessions of the human being to whom he 
imparts it. As explorers in a new country tell 
one another of the springs upon which they have 
chanced, of the fertile meadows one has found, of 
the sterile rocks or the luscious jungle, so men 
tell one another of their fresh findings in emotion. 
The knowledge of life — this is the passionate 
quest of the whole race of men. 

All that most deeply concerns man, all that 
reaches most penetratingly to the roots of being, 
is recorded, so far as humanity has been able to 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 47 

give to it expression, in art. Of all art, literature 
is perhaps the most universally intelligible ; or, if 
not that, it is at least the most positively intelli- 
gible. Our interest in life shows itself in a burn- 
ing curiosity to know what goes on in the minds 
of our friends ; to discover what others make out 
of existence, what they find in its possibilities, its 
limitations, its sorrows, and its delights. In vary- 
ing degrees, according to individual temperament, 
we pass life in an endeavor to discover and to share 
the feelings of other human beings. We explain 
our feelings, our motives ; we wonder whether 
they look to others as they do to us ; we speculate 
whether others have found a way to get from life 
more than we get ; and above all are we consciously 
or unconsciously eager to learn whether any other 
has contrived means of finding in life more vivid 
sensations, more vibrant emotions, more far-reach- 
ing feelings than those which we experience. It 
is in this insatiable curiosity that our deepest in- 
terest in literature lies. 

Books explain us to ourselves. They reveal to 
us capabilities in our nature before unsuspected. 
They make intelligible the meaning and signifi- 
cance of mental experiences. There are books the 
constant rereading of which presents itself to an 
imaginative man as a sort of moral duty, so great 
is the illumination which they throw upon the 
inner being. I could name works which I person- 
ally cannot leave long neglected without a feeling 
of conscious guilt. It is of books of this nature 
that Emerson says that they 



48 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Take rank in our life with parents and lovers and 
passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so 
revolutionary, so authoritative, — books which are the 
work and the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so 
nearly equal to the world which they paint, that 
though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels the 
exclusion from them to accuse his way of living. — 
Books. 



There are probably none of us who have lived 
in vital relations to literature who cannot remem- 
ber some book which has been an epoch in our 
lives. The times and the places when and where 
we read them stand out in memory as those of 
great mental crises. We recall the unforgettable 
night in which we sat until the cold gray dawn 
looked in at the window reading Lessing's "Na- 
than the Wise," the sunny slope where we experi- 
enced Madame de Gasparin's " Near and Heavenly 
Horizons," the winter twilight in the library when 
that most strenuous trumpet blast of all modern 
ethical poetry, " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 
Came," first rang in the ears of the inner self. 
We all have these memories. There are books 
which must to us always be alive. They have 
spoken to us ; we have heard their very voices ; we 
know them in our heart of hearts. 

That desire for sympathy which is universal is 
another strong incentive to acquaintance with lit- 
erature. The savage who is less miserable in fear 
or in suffering if he find a fellow whose living 
presence saves him from the awful sense of being 
alone is unconsciously moved by this desire. The 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 49 

more fully the race is developed the more is this 
craving for human companionship and human ap- 
preciation conscious. We know how impossible it 
is ever completely to blend our consciousness for 
the smallest instant with that of any other human 
being. The nearest approach to this is the shar- 
ing with another some common feeling. There are 
blissful moments when some other is absorbed in 
the same emotion as that which we feel ; when we 
seem to be one with the heart and the mind of 
another creature because the same strong passion 
sways us both. These are the mountain-tops of 
existence. These are the times which stand out in 
our remembrance as those in which life has touched 
in seeming the divine impossible. 

It is of the greatest rarity, however, that we 
find, even in our closest friends, that comprehen- 
sion and delicate sympathy for which we long. 
Indeed, such is human egotism that it is all but 
impossible for any one so far to abandon his own 
personality as to enter fully into the more delicate 
and intangible feelings of his fellow. A friend is 
another self, according to the proverb, but it is apt 
to be himself and not yourself. To find sympathy 
which comes from a knowledge that our inmost 
emotions are shared we turn to books. Especially 
is this true in bereavement and in sorrow. The 
touch of a human hand, the wistful look in the eye 
of the friend who longs to help, or the mere pres- 
ence of some beautiful and responsive spirit, is the 
best solace where comfort is impossible ; but even 
the tenderest human presence may jar, while in 



50 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

books there is a consolation and a tenderness un- 
hampered by the baffling sense of a consciousness 
still outside of our own no matter how strenuously 
it longs to be in perfect unity. I knew once a 
mother who had lost her only child, and who used 
to sit for hours pressing to her heart Plutarch's 
divinely tender letter to his wife on the death of 
his own little one. It was almost as if she felt her 
baby again in her arms, and the leather covers of 
the book were stained with tears consecrated and 
saving. Who could count the number to whom 
" In Memoriam " has carried comfort when living 
friends had no message ? The critical defects of 
that poem are not far to seek ; but it would ill be- 
come us to forget how many grief-laden hearts it 
has reached and touched. The book which lessens 
the pain of humanity is in so far higher than criti- 
cism. 

Josiah Quincy used in his old age to relate how 
his mother, left a young widow by the death of her 
husband within sight of the shores of America when 
on his return from a mission to England, found 
comfort in the soothing ministration of books : — 

She cultivated the memory of my father, even in 
my earliest childhood, by reading me passages from 
the poets, and obliging me to learn by heart and re- 
peat such as were best adapted to her own circum- 
stances and feelings. Among others the whole leave- 
taking of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book 
of Pope's Homer, was one of her favorite lessons. . . . 
Her imagination, probably, found consolation in the 
repetition of lines which brought to mind and seemed 
to typify her own great bereavement. 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 51 

And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be, — 
A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? 

These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's ad- 
dress and circumstances, she identified with her own 
sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repe- 
tition of them drew from her. 

This comforting power of literature is one which 
need not perhaps have been enlarged upon so fully, 
but it is one which has to do with the most inti- 
mate and poignant relations of life. 

It is largely in virtue of the sympathy which it 
is possible to feel for books that from them we not 
only receive a knowledge of the capacities of human 
emotion, but we are given actual emotional experi- 
ence as well. For literature has a twofold office. 
It not only shows the possibilities of life, but it 
may make these possibilities realities. If art sim- 
ply showed us what might be without aiding us 
further, it would be but a banquet of Tantalus. 
We must have the substance as well as the shadow. 
We are born not only with a craving to know what 
emotions are the birthright of man, but with an 
instinctive desire to enter into that inheritance. 
We wish to be all that it is possible for men to be. 
The small boy who burns to be a pirate or a police- 
man when he grows up, is moved by the idea that 
to men of these somewhat analogous callings come 
a richness of adventure and a fullness of sensation 
which are not to be found in ordinary lives. The 
lad does not reason this out, of course ; but the 
instinctive (Jesire for emotion speaks in him. We 
are born with the craving to know to the full the 



52 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

emotions of the race. It is to few of us in modern 
civilized life that circumstances permit a widely 
extended experience in actual mental sensations. 
The commonplace actualities of every-day life show 
plain and dull beside the almost infinite possibili- 
ties of existence. The realization of the contrast 
makes not a few mortals unhappy and dissatis- 
fied ; but those who are wiser accept life as it 
is, and turn to art for the gratification of the in- 
stinctive craving which is unsatisfied by outward 
reality. 

It may be that fate has condemned us to the 
most humdrum of existences. We trade or we 
teach or are lawyers or housekeepers, doctors or 
nurses, or the curse of the gods has fallen upon us 
and we are condemned to the dreariness of a life 
of pleasure-seeking. We cannot of ourselves know 
the delights of the free outlaw's life under " the 
greene shaw," — the chase of the deer, the twang 
of the bowstring, the song of the minstrel, the 
relish of venison pasty and humming nut-brown 
ale, are not for us in the flesh. If we go into the 
library, however, take down that volume with the 
cover of worn brown leather, and give up the ima- 
gination to the guidance of the author, all these 
things become possible to the inner sense. We 
become aware of the reek of the woodland fire, the 
smell of the venison roasting on spits of ash-wood, 
the chatter of deep manly voices, the cheery sound 
of the bugle-horn afar, the misty green light of 
the forest, the soft sinking feel of the moss upon 
which in imagination we have flung ourselves 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 53 

dowD, while Will Scarlet teases Friar Tuck yon- 
der, and Allan-a-Dale touches light wandering 
chords on his harp. — Ah, where are the four 
walls of the library, where is the dull round of 
cares and trifles which involve us day by day? 
We are in merry Sherwood with bold Robin Hood, 
and we know what there was felt and lived. 

We cannot in outward experience know how 
a great and generous heart must feel, broken by 
ingratitude and unfaith, deceived and tortured 
through its noblest qualities, outraged in its high- 
est love. The poet says to us : " Come with me ; 
and through the power of the imagination, talis- 
man more potent than the ring of Solomon, we 
will enter the heart of Othello, and with him 
suffer this agony. We will endure the torture, 
since behind it is the exquisite delight of appeas- 
ing that insatiable thirst for a share in human v 
emotions. Or would you taste the passion of 
young and ardent hearts, their woe at parting, and 
their resolved devotion which death itself cannot 
abate ? We will be one with Romeo and one with 
Juliet." Thus, if we will, we may go with him 
through the entire range of mortal joys and sor- 
rows. We live with a fullness of living beside 
which, it may be, our ordinary existence is flat 
and pale. We find the real life, the life of the 
imagination ; and we recognize that this is after 
all more vital than our concern over the price of 
stocks, our petty bother about the invitation to 
the Hightops' ball on the twenty-fourth, or the 
silly pang of brief jealousy which we experienced 



54 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

when we heard that Jack Scribbler's sonnet was to 
appear in the next number of the magazine which 
had just returned our own poem "with thanks." 
The littlenesses of the daily round slip out of 
sight before the nobility of the life possible in 
the imagination. 

It is not necessary to multiply examples of the 
pleasures possible through the imagination. Every 
reader knows how varied and how enchanting they 
are. To enter into them is in so far to fulfill the 
possibilities of life. The knowledge which is ob- 
tained through books is not the same, it is true, as 
that which comes from actual doing and enduring. 
Perhaps if the imagination were sufficiently devel- 
oped there would be little difference. There have 
been men who have been hardly able to distinguish 
between what they experienced in outward life 
and what belonged solely to the inner existence. 
Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats made no 
great or sharply defined distinction between the 
things which were true in fact and those that were 
true in imagination. To Blake the events of life 
were those which he knew through imagination, 
while what happened in ordinary, every-day exis- 
tence he regarded as the accidental and the non- 
essential. 

It will probably be thought, however, that those 
who live most abundantly are not likely to feel 
the need of testing existence and tasting emotions 
through the medium of letters. The pirate, when 
decks are red and smoke of powder is in the air, 
is not likely to retire to his cabin for a session of 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 55 

quiet and delightful reading ; the lover may peruse 
sentimental ballads or make them, but on the 
whole everything else is subordinate to the romance 
he is living. It is when his lady-love keeps him 
at a distance that he has time for verse ; not when 
she graciously allows him near. It is told of Dar- 
win that his absorption in science destroyed not 
only his love of Shakespeare but even his power of 
enjoying music. The actual interests of life were 
so vivid that the artistic sense was numbed. The 
imagination exhausted itself in exploring the un- 
known world of scientific knowledge. It is to be 
noted that boys who go deeply into college sports, 
especially if they are on the " teams," are likely 
to become so absorbed in the sporting excitement 
that literature appears to them flat and tame. The 
general rule is that he who lives in stimulating 
and absorbing realities is thereby likely to be in- 
clined to care less for literature. 

It is to be remembered, however, that individual 
experience is apt to be narrow, and that it may be 
positively trivial and still engross the mind. That 
one is completely given up to affairs does not 
necessarily prove these affairs to be noble. It is 
generally agreed, too, that the mind is more elas- 
tic which is reached and developed by literature ; 
and that even the scientist is likely to do better 
work for having ennobled his perceptions by con- 
tact with the thoughts of master spirits. Before 
Darwin was able to advance so far in science as 
to have no room left for art, he had trained his 
faculties by the best literature. At least it is time 



56 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

enough to give up books when life has become so 
full of action as to leave no room for them. This 
happens to few, and even those of whom it is true 
cannot afford to do without literature as an agent 
in the development and shaping of character. 

The good which we gain from the experiences 
of life we call insight. No man or woman ever 
loved without thereby gaining insight into what 
life really is. No man has stood smoke-stained 
and blood-spattered in the midst of battle, caught 
away out of self in an ecstasy of daring, without 
thereby learning hitherto undreamed-of possibili- 
ties in existence. Indeed this is true of the small- 
est incident. Character is the result of experience 
upon temperament, as ripple-marks are the result 
of the coming together of sand and wave. In life, 
however, we are generally more slow to learn the 
lessons from events than from books. The author 
of genius has the art so to arrange and present 
his truths as to impress them upon the reader. 
The impressions of events remain with us, but it 
is not easy for ordinary mortals so to realize their 
meaning and so to phrase it that it shall remain 
permanent and clear in the mind. The mental 
vision is clouded, moreover, by the personal ele- 
ment. We are seldom able to be perfectly frank 
with ourselves. Self is ever the apologist for self. 
Knowledge without self -honesty is as a torch with- 
out flame ; yet of all the moral graces self -honesty 
is perhaps the most difficult to acquire. In its 
acquirement is literature of the highest value. A 
man can become acquainted with his spiritual face 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 57 

as with his bodily countenance only by its reflec- 
tion. Literature is the mirror in which the soul 
learns to recognize its own lineaments. 

Above all these personal reasons which make 
literature worthy of the serious attention of ear- 
nest men and women is the great fact that upon the 
proper development and the proper understanding 
of it depend largely the advancement and the wise 
ordering of civilization. Stevenson spoke words of 
wisdom when he said : — 

One thing you can never make Philistine natures 
understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, 
remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of 
metaphysics, — namely, that the business of life is 
mainly carried on by the difficult art of literature, 
and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall 
be the freedom and fullness of his intercourse with 
other men. 

In a fine passage in a little-known pamphlet, James 
Hannay touches upon the relation of literature to 
life and to the practical issues of society : — 

A notion is abroad that that only is "practical " 
which can be measured or eaten. Show us its net 
result in marketable form, the people say, and we 
will recognize it! But what if there be something 
prior to all such "net results," something higher than 
it? For example, the writing of an old Hebrew 
Prophet was by no manner of means "practical " in 
his own times! The supply of figs to the Judean 
markets, the price of oil in the synagogue-lamps, did 
not fluctuate with the breath of those inspired songs ! 
But in due time the prophet dies, stoned, perhaps, 
. . . and in the course of ages, his words do have a 



58 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

"practical " result by acting on the minds of nations. 
... In England what has not happened from the 
fact that the Bible was translated? We have seen 
the Puritans — we know what we owe to them — 
what the world owes to them! A dozen or two of 
earnest men two centuries ago were stirred to the 
depths of their souls by the visions of earnest men 
many centuries before that ; do you not see that the 
circumstance has its practical influence in the cotton- 
markets of America at this hour ? — Quoted in Espi- 
nasse's Literary Recollections. 

It is impossible to separate the influences of lit- 
erature from the growth of society and of civili- 
zation. It is because of the reaching of the im- 
agination into the unknown vast which incloses 
man that life is what it is. The order that is given 
to butcher or baker or candlestick-maker is modi- 
fied by the fact that Homer and Dante and Shake- 
speare sang ; that the prophets and the poets and 
the men of imagination of whatever time and race 
have made thought and feeling what they are. 
" The world of imagination," Blake wrote, " is the 
world of eternity." Whatever of permanent inter- 
est and value man has achieved he has reached 
through this divine faculty, and it is only when 
man learns to know and to enter the world of im- 
agination that he comes into actual contact with 
the vital and the fundamental in human life. 
Easily abused, like all the best gifts of the gods, 
art remains the noblest and the most enduring 
power at work in civilization ; and literature is its 
most direct embodiment. To it we go when we 
would leave behind the sordid, the mean, and the 



WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 59 

belittling. When we would enter into our birth- 
right, when we remember that instead of being 
mere creatures of the dust we are the heirs of the 
ages, then it is through books that we find and 
possess the treasures of the race. 



FALSE METHODS 

The most common intellectual difficulty is not 
that of the lack of ideas, but that of vagueness of 
ideas. Most persons of moderately good education 
have plenty of thoughts such as they are, but there 
is a nebulous quality about these which renders 
them of little use in reasoning. This makes it 
necessary to define what is meant by the Study 
of Literature, as in the first place it was necessary 
to define literature itself. Many have a formless 
impression that it is something done with books, a 
sort of mysterious rite known only to the initiated, 
and probably a good deal like the mysteries of 
secret societies, — more of a theory than an actu- 
ality. Others, who are more confident of their 
powers of accurate thinking, have decided that the 
phrase is merely a high-sounding name for any 
reading which is not agreeable, but which is recom- 
mended by text-books. Some take it to be getting 
over all the books possible, good, bad, and indif- 
ferent ; while still others suppose it to be reading 
about books or their authors. There are plenty 
of ideas as to what the study of literature is, but 
the very diversity of opinion proves that at least 
a great many of these must be erroneous. 



FALSE METHODS 61 

In the first place the study of literature is not 
the mere reading of books. Going on a sort of 
Cook's tour through literature, checking off on 
lists what one has read, may be amusing to simple 
souls, but beyond that it means little and effects 
little. As the question to be asked in regard to a 
tourist is how intelligently and how observantly he 
has traveled, so the first consideration in regard to 
a reader is how he reads. 

The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic 
of this restless time has been extended to fashions 
of reading. By some sort of a vicious perversion, 
the old saw that he who runs may read seems 
to have been transposed to " He who reads must 
run." In other words there is too often an as- 
sumption that the intellectual distinction of an 
individual is to be estimated by the rapidity with 
which he is able to hurry through the volumes he 
handles. Intellectual assimilation takes time. The 
mind is not to be enriched as a coal barge is loaded. 
Whatever is precious in a cargo is taken carefully 
on board and carefully placed. Whatever is deli- 
cate and fine must be received delicately, and its 
place in the mind thoughtfully assigned. 

One effect of the modern habit of swift and 
careless reading is seen in the impatience with 
which anything is regarded which is not to be 
taken in at a glance. The modern reader is apt 
to insist that a book shall be like a theatre-poster. 
He must be able to take it all in with a look as 
he goes past it on a wheel, and if he cannot he 
declares that it is obscure. W. M. Hunt said, with 



62 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

bitter wisdom: "As print grows cheap, thinkers 
grow scarce." The enormous increase of books 
has bred a race of readers who seem to feel that 
the object of reading is not to read but to have 
read ; not to enjoy and assimilate, but to have 
turned over the greatest possible number of au- 
thors. This idea of the study of literature is as if 
one selected as the highest social ideal the after- 
noon tea, where the visitor is presented to number- 
less strangers and has. an opportunity of conversing 
rationally with nobody. 

A class of self-styled students of literature far 
more pernicious than even the record-breaking 
readers is that of the gossip-mongers. These are 
they who gratify an innate fondness of gossip and 
scandal under the pretext of seeking culture, and 
who feed an impertinent curiosity in the name of 
a noble pursuit. They read innumerable volumes 
filled with the more or less spicy details of authors ; 
they perhaps visit the spots where the geniuses of 
the world lived and worked. They peruse eagerly 
every scrap of private letters, journals, and other 
personal matter which is available. For them are 
dragged to light all the imperfect manuscripts 
which famous novelists have forgotten to burn. 
For them was perpetrated the infamy of the pub- 
lication of the correspondence of Keats with Miss 
Brawne ; to them Mrs. Stowe appealed in her foul 
book about Byron, which should have been burned 
by the common hangman. It is they who buy the 
newspaper descriptions of the back bedroom of 
the popular novelist and the accounts of the mis- 



FALSE METHODS 63 

understanding between the poet and his washer- 
woman. They scent scandal as swine scent truf- 
fles, and degrade the noble name of literature by- 
making it an excuse for their petty vulgarity. 

The race is by no means a new one. Milton 
complained of it in the early days of the church, 
when, he says : — 

With less fervency was studied what St. Paul or 
St. John had written than was listened to one that 
could say : " Here he taught, here he stood, this was 
his stature, and thus he went habited," and, " O 
happy this house that harbored him, and that cold 
stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought 
a miracle." 

Schopenhauer, too, has his indignant protest 
against this class : — 

Petrarch's house in Arqua, Tasso's supposed prison 
in Ferrara, Shakespeare's house in Stratford, Goethe's 
house in Weimar, with its furniture, Kant's old hat, 
the autographs of great men, — these things are gaped 
at with interest and awe by many who have never 
read their works. 

All this is of course a matter of personal vanity. 
Small souls pride themselves upon having these 
things, upon knowing intimate details of the lives 
of prominent persons. They endeavor thus to at- 
tach themselves to genius, as burrs cling to the 
mane of a lion. The imagination has nothing to 
do with it ; there is in it no love of literature. It 
is vanity pure and simple, a common vulgar van- 
ity which substitutes self-advertisement and gossip- 
mongering for respect and appreciation. Who 



64 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

can have tolerance for the man whose proudest 
boast is that he was in a crowd presented to some 
poet whose books he never read; for the woman 
who claims attention on the ground that she has 
from her seamstress heard particulars of the do- 
mestic infelicities of a great novelist ; or for the 
gossip of either sex who takes pride in knowing 
about famous folk trifles which are nobody's busi- 
ness but their own ? 

A good many text-books encourage this folly, 
and there are not a few writers who pass their 
useless days in grubbing in the dust-heaps of the 
past to discover the unessential and unmeaning 
incidents in the lives of bygone worthies. They 
put on airs of vast superiority over mortals who 
scorn their ways and words ; they have only pity- 
ing contempt for readers who suppose that the 
works of an author are what the world should 
be concerned with instead of his grocery bills and 
the dust on his library table. Such meddlers 
have no more to do with literature than the spider 
on the eaves of kings' houses has to do with affairs 
of state. 

It is not that all curiosity about famous men is 
unwholesome or impertinent. The desire to know 
about those whose work has touched us is natural 
and not necessarily objectionable. It is outside of 
the study of literature, save in so far as it now 
and then — less often, I believe, than is usually 
assumed — may help us to understand what an 
author has written ; yet within proper limits it is 
to be indulged in, just as we all indulge now and 



FALSE METHODS 65 

then in harmless gossip concerning our fellows. 
It is almost sure to be a hindrance rather than a 
help in the study of literature if it goes much be- 
yond the knowledge of those circumstances in the 
life of an author which have directly affected what 
he has written. There are few facts in literary 
history for which we have so great reason to be 
devoutly thankful as that so little is known con- 
cerning the life of the greatest of poets. We are 
able to read Shakespeare with little or no inter- 
ruption in the way of detail about his private 
affairs, and for this every lover of Shakespeare's 
poetry should be grateful. 

The study of literature, it must be recognized 
farther, is not the study of the history of lit- 
erature. The development of what are termed 
" schools " of literature ; the change in fashions of 
expression ; the modifications in verse-forms and 
the growth and decay of this or that phase of 
popular taste in books, are all matters of interest 
in a way. They are not of great value, as a rule, 
yet they will often help the reader to a somewhat 
quicker appreciation of the force and intention of 
literary forms. It is necessary to have at least a 
general idea of the course of literary and intellec- 
tual growth through the centuries in order to ap- 
preciate and comprehend literature, — the point to 
be kept in mind being that this is a means and 
not in itself an end. It is necessary, for instance, 
for the student to toil painfully across the wastes 
of print produced in the eighteenth century, 
wherein there is little really great save the works 



66 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

of Fielding ; and where the reader has to endure 
a host of tedious books in order properly to appre- 
ciate the manly tenderness of Steele, the boyishly 
spontaneous realism of Defoe, the kindly humanity 
of Goldsmith, and the frail, exquisite pipe of Col- 
lins. The rest of the eighteenth century authors 
most of us read chiefly as a part of the mechanics 
of education. We could hardly get on intelli- 
gently without a knowledge of the polished prim- 
ness of Addison, genius of respectability ; the vit- 
riolic venom of Swift, genius of malignity; the 
spiteful perfection of Pope, genius of artificiality ; 
or the interminable attitudinizing of Richardson, 
genius of sentimentality. These authors we read 
quite as much as helps in understanding others as 
for their own sake. We do not always have the 
courage to acknowledge it, but these men do not 
often touch our emotions, even though the page 
be that of Swift, so much the greatest of them. 
We examine the growth of the romantic spirit 
through the unpoetic days between the death of 
Dry den and the coining of Blake and Coleridge 
and Wordsworth ; and from such examination of 
the history of literature we are better enabled to 
form standards for the actual estimate of literature 
itself. 

There is a wide and essential difference between 
really entering into literature and reading what 
somebody else has been pleased to say of it, no 
matter how wise and appreciative this may be. 
Of course the genuine student has small sympathy 
with those demoralizing flippancies about books 



FALSE METHODS 67 

which are just now so common in the guise of 
smart essays upon authors or their works ; those 
papers in which adroit literary hacks write about 
books as the things with which they have meddled 
most. The man who reads for himself and thinks 
for himself realizes that these essayists are the 
gypsy-moths of literature, living upon it and at 
the same time doing their best to destroy it ; and 
that the reading of these petty imitations of criti- 
cism is about as intellectual as sitting down in the 
nursery to a game of " Authors." 

Even the reading of good and valuable papers 
is not the study of literature in the best sense. 
There is much of profit in such admirable essays 
as those, for instance, of Lowell, of John Morley, 
or of Leslie Stephen. Excellent and often inspir- 
ing as these may be, however, it is not to be for- 
gotten that as criticisms their worth lies chiefly in 
the incitement which they give to go to the foun- 
tain-head. The really fine essay upon a master- 
piece is at its best an eloquent presentment of the 
delights and benefits which the essayist has received 
from the work of genius ; it shows the possibilities 
and the worth within the reach of all. Criticisms 
are easily abused. We are misusing the most sym- 
pathetic interpretation when we receive it dogmat- 
ically. In so far as they make us see what is high 
and fine, they are of value ; in so far as we depend 
upon the perceptions of the critic instead of our 
own, they are likely to be a hindrance. It is easier 
to think that we perceive than it is really to see ; 
but it is well to remember that a man may be plas- 



68 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tered from head to feet with the opinions of others, 
and yet have no more genuine ideas of his own 
than has a bill-board because it is covered with 
posters. Genuine emotion is born of genuine con- 
viction. A reader is really touched by a work of 
art only as he enters into it and comprehends it 
sympathetically. Another may point the way, but 
he must travel it for himself. Reading an imagi- 
native work is like wooing a maiden. Another 
may give the introduction, but for real acquaint- 
ance and all effective love-making the suitor must 
depend upon himself if he would be well sped. 
Critics may tell us what they admire, but the vital 
question is what we in all truth and sincerity ad- 
mire and appreciate ourselves. 



VI 

METHODS OF STUDY 

We have spoken of what the study of literature 
is not, but negations do not define. It is necessary 
to look at the affirmative side of the matter. And 
first it is well to remark that what we are discuss- 
ing is the examination of literature, — literature, 
that is, in the sense to which we have limited the 
term by definition : " The adequate expression of 
genuine emotion." It is not intended to include 
trash, whether that present itself as undisguised 
rubbish or whether it mask under high-sounding 
names of Symbolism, Impressionism, Realism, or 
any other affected nomenclature whatever. It has 
never been found necessary to excuse the existence 
of the masterpieces of literature by a labored lit- 
erary theory or a catchpenny classification. It is 
generally safe to suspect the book which must be 
defended by a formula and the writers who insist 
that they are the founders of a school. There is 
but one school of art — the imaginative. 

" But," it may be objected, " in an age when the 
books of the world are numbered by millions, when 
it is impossible for any reader to examine per- 
sonally more than an insignificant portion even of 
those thrust upon his notice, how is the learner to 



70 THE STJJDY OF LITERATURE 

judge what are worthy of his attention? To this 
it is to be answered that there are works enough 
universally approved to keep the readiest reader 
more than busy through the span of the longest 
human life. We shall have occasion later to speak 
of especial authors and of especial books. Here 
it is enough to say that certainly at the start the 
student must be content to accept the verdict of 
those who are capable of judging for him. Herein 
lies one of the chief benefits to be derived from 
critics and essayists. As the learner advances, he 
will find that as his taste and appreciation advance 
with them will develop an instinct of choice. In 
the end he should be able almost at a glance to 
judge rightly whether a book is worthy of atten- 
tion. In the meanwhile he need not go astray if 
he follow the lead of trustworthy experts! 

In accepting the opinions of others it is of 
course proper to use some caution, and above all 
things it is important to be guided by common 
sense. The market is full of quack mental as well 
as of quack physical nostrums. There is a large 
and enterprising body of publishers who seem per- 
suaded that they have reduced all literature to a 
practical industrial basis by furnishing patent out- 
sides for newspapers and patent insides for aspir- 
ing minds. In these days one becomes intellectual 
by prescription, and it is impossible to tell how 
soon will be advertised the device of inoculation 
against illiteracy. Common sense and a sense of 
humor save one from many dangers, and it is well 
to let both have full play. 



METHODS OF STUDY 71 

I have spoken earlier in these talks of the pleas- 
ure of literary study. One fundamental principle 
in the selection of books is that it is idle to read 
what is not enjoyed. For special information one 
may read that which is not attractive save as it 
serves the purpose of the moment ; but in all read- 
ing which is of permanent value for itself, enjoy- 
ment is a prime essential. Reading which is not 
a pleasure is a barren mistake. The first duty of 
the student toward literature and toward himself is 
the same, — enjoyment. Either take pleasure in a 
work of art or let it alone. 

It is idle to force the mind to attend to works 
which it does not find pleasurable, and yet it is 
necessary to read books which are approved as the 
masterpieces of literature. Here is a seeming con- 
tradiction ; but it must be remembered that it is 
possible to arouse the mind to interest. The books 
which are really worth attention will surely attract 
and hold if they are once properly approached and 
apprehended. If a mind is indolent, if it is able 
to enjoy only the marshmallows and chocolate car- 
amels of literature, it is not to be fed solely on 
literary sweetmeats. Whatever is read should be 
enjoyed, but it by no means follows that whatever 
can be enjoyed should be read. It is possible to 
cultivate the habit of enjoying what is good, what 
is vital, as it is easy to sink into the stupid and 
slipshod way of caring for nothing which calls for 
mental exertion. It requires training and purpose. 
The love of the best in art is possessed as a gift 
of nature by only a few, and the rest of us must 



72 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

labor for it. The full appreciation of the work of 
a master-mind comes to no one without effort. The 
reward of the student of literature is great, but his 
labor also is great. Literature is not like an empty- 
public square, which even a blind beggar may cross 
almost unconsciously. It more resembles an en- 
chanted castle beset with spell-infested forests and 
ghoul-haunted mountains ; a place into which only 
that knight may enter who is willing to fight his 
way through dangers and difficulties manifold ; yet 
a place, too, of infinite riches and joys beyond the 
imaginings of dull souls. ^ 

It is a popular fallacy that art is to be appreci- 
ated without especial education. Common feeling 
holds that the reader, like the poet, is born and 
not made. It is generally assumed that one is en- 
dowed by nature with an appreciation of art as one 
is born with a pug nose. The only element of 
truth in this is the fact that all human powers are 
modified by the personal equation. One is en- 
dowed at birth with perceptions fine and keen, while 
another lacks them ; but no matter what one's nat- 
ural powers, there must be cultivation. This culti- 
vation costs care, labor, and patience. It is, it is 
true, labor which is in itself delightful, and one 
might easily do worse than to follow it for itself 
without thought of other end ; but it is still labor, 
and labor strenuous and long enduring. 

It is first necessary, then, to make an endeavor 
to become interested in whatever it has seemed 
worth while to read. The student should try ear- 
nestly to discover wherein others have found it 



METHODS OF STUDY 73 

good. Every reader is at liberty to like or to dis- 
like even a masterpiece ; but he is not in a position 
even to have an opinion of it until he appreciates 
why it has been admired. He must set himself to 
realize not what is bad in a book, but what is good. 
The common theory that the critical faculties are 
best developed by training the mind to detect short- 
comings is as vicious as it is false. Any carper 
can find the faults in a great work ; it is only the 
enlightened who can discover all its merits. It will 
seldom happen that a sincere effort to appreciate a 
good book will leave the reader uninterested. If it 
does, it is generally safe to conclude that the mind 
is not ready for this particular work. There must 
be degrees of development ; and the same literature 
is not adapted to all stages. If you cannot honestly 
enjoy a thing you are from one cause or another in 
no condition to read it. Either the time is not ripe 
or it has no message for your especial temperament. 
To force yourself to read what does not please you 
is like forcing yourself to eat that for which you 
have no appetite. There may be some nourishment 
in one case as in the other, but there is far more 
likely to be indigestion. 

An essential condition of profitable reading is 
that it shall be intelligent. The extent to which 
some persons can go on reading without having any 
clear idea of what they read is stupefyingly amaz- 
ing ! You may any day talk in society with per- 
sons who have gone through exhaustive courses of 
reading, yet who from them have no more got real 
ideas than a painted bee would get honey from a 



74 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

painted flower. Fortunately ordinary mortals are 
not so bad as this ; but is there one of us who is 
not conscious of having tobogganed down many and 
many a page without pausing thoroughly to seize 
and master a single thought by the way ? 

It is well to make in the mind a sharp distinction 
between apprehending and comprehending. The 
difference is that between sighting and bagging 
your game. To run hastily along through a book, 
catching sight of the meaning of the author, get- 
ting a general notion of what he would convey, — 
casually apprehending his work, — is one thing ; it 
is quite another to enter fully into the thoughts 
and emotions embodied, to make them yours by 
thorough appreciation, — in a word to comprehend. 
The trouble which Gibbon says he took to get the 
most out of what he read must strike ordinary 
readers with amazement : — 

After glancing my eye over the design and order of 
a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had fin- 
ished the task of self-examination; till I had resolved 
in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed or had 
thought on the subject of the whole work or of some 
particular chapter ; I was then qualified to discern how 
much the author added to my original stock ; and if I 
was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was some- 
times armed by the opposition, of our ideas. 

It often happens that the average person does 
not read with sufficient deliberation even to appre- 
hend what is plainly said. If there be a succession 
of particulars, for instance, it is only the excep- 
tional reader who takes the time to comprehend 



METHODS OF STUDY 75 

fully each in turn. Suppose the passage to be the 
lines in the " Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of 
Chamouni : " — 

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, 
Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam. 

The ordinary student gets a general and probably 
a vague impression of cataracts, dashing down from 
the glacier-heaped hills ; and that is the whole of 
it. A poet does not put in a succession of words 
like this merely to fill out his line. Coleridge in 
writing undoubtedly realized the torrent so fully 
in his imagination that it was as if he were behold- 
ing it. " What strength ! " was his first thought. 
" What speed," was the next. " What fury ; yet, 
too, what joy ! " Then the ideas of that fury and 
that joy made it seem to him as if the noise of the 
waters was the voice in which these emotions were 
embodied, and as if the unceasing thunder were a 
sentient cry ; while the eternal foam was the visi- 
ble sign of the mighty passions of the " five wild 
torrents, fiercely glad." 

In the dirge in " Cymbeline," Shakespeare 
writes : — 

Fear no more the frown o' the great, 
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke ; 

Care no more to clothe and eat ; 
To thee the reed is as the oak ; 

The sceptre, learning, physic, must 

All follow this, and come to dust. 

As you read, do you comprehend the exquisite 
propriety of the succession of the ideas ? Death 
has removed Fidele from the possibility of misfor- 



76 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tune ; even the lords of the world can trouble no 
longer. Nay, more; it has done away with all 
need of care for the sordid details of every-day 
life, food and raiment. All that earth holds is 
now alike indifferent to the dead ; the pale, wind- 
shaken reed is neither more nor less important 
than the steadfast and enduring oak. And to this, 
the thought runs on, must come even the mighty, 
the sceptred ones of earth. Not learning, which 
is mightier than temporal power, can save from 
this ; not physic itself, of which the mission is to 
fight with death, can in the end escape the uni- 
versal doom. 

All follow this, and come to dust. 

Hurried over as a catalogue, to take one example 
more, how dull is the following from Marlowe's 
" Jew of Malta ; " but how sumptuous it becomes 
when the reader gloats over the name of each 
jewel as would do the Jew who is speaking : — 

The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks 

Without control can pick his riches up, 

And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones, 

Receive them free, and sell them by the weight ; 

Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 

Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 

Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 

And seld-seen costly stones of so great price 

As one of them indifferently rated, 

And of a carat of this quantity, 

May serve, in peril of calamity, 

To ransom great kings from captivity. 

I have not much sympathy with the trick of 
reading into an author all sorts of far-fetched 



METHODS OF STUDY 77 

meanings of which he can never have dreamed; 
but, as it is only by observing these niceties of 
language that a writer is able to convey delicate 
shades of thought and feeling, so it is only by ap- 
preciation of them that the reader is able to grasp 
completely the intention which lies wrapped in the 
verbal form. 

To read intelligibly, it is often necessary to know 
something of the conditions under which a thing 
was written. There are allusions to the history of 
the time or to contemporary events which would 
be meaningless to one ignorant of the world in 
which the author lived. To see any point to the 
fiery and misplaced passage in " Lycidas " in 
which Milton denounces the hireling priesthood 
and the ecclesiastic evils of his day, one must un- 
derstand something of theological politics. We 
are aided in the comprehension of certain passages 
in the plays of Shakespeare by familiarity with 
the conditions of the Elizabethan stage and of the 
court intrigues. In so far it is sometimes an ad- 
vantage to know the personal history of a writer, 
and the political and social details of his time. 
For the most part the portions which require elab- 
orate explanation are not of permanent interest or 
at least not of great importance. The intelligent 
reader, however, will not wish to be tripped up by 
passages which he cannot understand, and will 
therefore be likely to inform himself at least suffi- 
ciently to clear up these. 

Any reader, moreover, must to some extent 
know the life and customs of the people among 



78 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

whom a work is produced. To one who failed 
to appreciate wherein the daily existence of the 
ancient Greeks differed from that of moderns, 
Homer would hardly be intelligible. It would be 
idle to read Dante under the impression that the 
Italy of his time was that of to-day ; or to under- 
take Chaucer without knowing, at least in a gen- 
eral way, how his England was other than that of 
our own time. The force of language at a given 
epoch, the allusions to contemporary events, the 
habits of thought and custom must be understood 
by him who would read comprehendingly. 

When all is said there will still remain much 
that must depend upon individual experience. If 
one reads in Lowell : — 

And there the fount "rises ; . . . . 

No dew-drop is stiller 

In its lupin-leaf setting 
Than this water moss-hounded ; 

one cannot have a clear and lively idea of what is 
meant who has not actually seen a furry lupin-leaf, 
held up like a green, hairy hand, with its dew- 
drop, round as a pearl. The context, of course, 
gives a general impression of what the poet in- 
tended, but unless experience has given the reader 
this bit of nature-lore, ^the color and vitality of the 
passage are greatly lessened. One of the priceless 
advantages to be gained from a habit of careful 
reading is the consciousness of the significance of 
small things, and in consequence the habit of ob- 
serving them carefully. When we have read the 
bit just quoted, for instance, we are sure to perceive 



METHODS OF STUDY 79 

the beauty of the lupin-leaf with its dew-pearl if it 
come in our way. The attention becomes acute, 
and that which would otherwise pass unregarded 
becomes a source of pleasure. The most sure way 
to enrich life is to learn to appreciate trifles. 

There is a word of warning which should here 
be spoken to the over-conscientious student. The 
desire of doing well may lead to overdoing. The 
student, in his anxiety to accomplish his full duty 
by separate words, often lets himself become ab- 
sorbed in them. He drops unconsciously from the 
study of literature into the study of philology. 
There have been hundreds of painfully learned 
men who have employed the whole of their mis- 
guided lives in encumbering noble books with 
philological excrescences. I do not wish to speak 
disrespectfully of the indefatigable clan character- 
ized by Cowper as 

Philologists, who chase 
A panting- syllable through time and space ; 
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark. 

These gentlemen are extremely useful in their way 
and place ; but the study of philology is not the 
study of literature. It is at best one of its humble 
bond-slaves. A philologist may be minutely ac- 
quainted with every twig in the family-tree of each 
obsolete word in the entire range of Elizabethan 
literature, and yet be as darkly and as completely 
ignorant of that glorious world of poetry as the 
stokers in an ocean steamer are of the beauty of 
the sunset seen from the deck. It is often neces- 



80 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

sary to know the derivation of a term, and perhaps 
something of its history, in order to appreciate its 
force in a particular usage ; but to go through a 
book merely to pick out examples for philologic 
research is like picking to pieces a mosaic to ex- 
amine the separate bits of glass. 

While, moreover, attention to the force and value 
of details is insisted upon, it must never be for- 
gotten that the whole is of more value than any or 
all of its parts. The reader must strive to receive 
the effect of a book not only bit by bit, and page 
by page, and chapter by chapter, but as a book. 
There should be in the mind a complete and ample 
conception of it as a unit. It is not enough to 
appreciate the best passages individually. The 
work is not ours until it exists in the mind as 
a beautiful whole, as single and unbroken as one 
of those Japanese crystal globes which look like 
spheres of living water. He who knows the worth 
and beauty of passages is like an explorer. He is 
neither a conqueror nor a ruler of the territory he 
has seen until it is his in its entirety. 

I believe that to comparatively few readers does 
it occur to make deliberate and conscious effort to 
realize works as wholes. The impression which a 
book leaves in the thought is of course in some 
sense a result of what the book is as a unit ; but 
this is seldom sharply clear and vivid. The greatest 
works naturally give the most complete impression, 
and the power of producing an effect as a whole 
is one of the tests of art. The writer of genius 
is able so to choose what is significant, and so to 



METHODS OF STUDY 81 

arrange his material that the appreciative reader 
cannot fail to receive some one grand and domi- 
nating impression. It is hardly possible, for in- 
stance, for any intelligent person to fail to feel the 
cumulative passion of " King Lear." The calami- 
ties which come upon the old man connect them- 
selves in the mind of the reader so closely with one 
central idea that it is rather difficult to escape 
from the dominant idea than difficult to find it. 
In " Hamlet," on the other hand, it is by no means 
easy to gain any complete and adequate grasp of 
the play as a unit without careful and intimate 
study. It is, moreover, not sure that one has 
gained a full conception of a work as a whole be- 
cause one has an impression even so strong as that 
which must come to any receptive reader of " King 
Lear " or " Othello." To be profoundly touched 
by the story is possible without so fully holding 
the tragedy comprehendingly in the mind that its 
poignant meaning kindles the whole imagination. 
We have not assimilated that from which we have 
received merely fragmentary impressions. The ap- 
preciative reading of a really great book is a pro- 
found emotional experience. Individual portions 
and notable passages are at best but as incidents of 
which the real significance is to be perceived only 
in the light of the whole. 

The power of grasping a work of art as a unit is 
one which should be deliberately cultivated. It is 
hardly likely to come unsought, even to the most 
imaginative. It must rest, in the first place, upon 
a reading of books as a whole. Whatever in any 



82 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

serious sense is worth reading once is worth reread- 
ing indefinitely. It is idle to hope to grasp a thing 
as a whole until one has become familiar with its 
parts. When once the details are clear in the 
mind, it is possible to read with a distinct and de- 
liberate sense of the share that each passage bears 
in the entire purpose. It is necessary, and I may 
add that it is enchanting, to reread until the de- 
tached points gather themselves together in the 
inner consciousness as molecules in a solution 
gather themselves into a crystal. The delight of 
being able to realize what an author had in mind 
as a whole is like that of the traveler who at last, 
after long days of baffling mists which allowed but 
broken glimpses here and there, sees before him 
the whole of some noble mountain, stripped clean of 
clouds, standing sublime between earth and heaven. 
Whatever effect a book has must depend largely 
upon the sympathy between the reader and the 
author. To read sympathetically is as fundamen- 
tal a condition of good reading as is to read 
intelligently. It is well known how impossible it 
is to talk with a person who is unresponsive, who 
will not yield his own mood, and who does not 
share another's point of view. On the other hand, 
we have all tried to listen to speakers with whom it 
was not in our power to find ourselves in accord, 
and the result was merely unprofitable weariness. 
For the time being the reader must give himself up 
to the mood of the writer ; he must follow his guid- 
ance, and receive not only his words but his sug- 
gestions with fullest acquiescence of perception. 



METHODS OF STUDY 83 

whatever be the differences of judgment. What 
Hawthorne has said of painting is equally applica- 
ble to literature : — 

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and 
wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a sur- 
render of himself, in due proportion with the miracle 
which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it 
may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its high- 
est excellence escapes you. There is always the ne- 
cessity of helping out the painter's art with your own 
resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that 
these qualities shall really add anything to what the 
master has effected ; but they must be put so entirely 
under his control and work along with him to such an 
extent that, in a different mood, when you are cold 
and critical instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to 
fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of 
your own dreaming, not of his creating. Like all reve- 
lations of the better life, the adequate perception of a 
great work demands a gifted simplicity of vision. — 
Marble Faun, xxxvii. 

Often it is difficult to find any meaning in what 
is written unless the reader has entered into the 
spirit in which it was composed. I seriously doubt, 
for instance, whether the ordinary person, coming 
upon the following catch of satyrs, by Ben Jonson, 
is able to find it much above the level of the melo- 
dies of Mother Goose : — 

" Buz," quoth the blue fly, 

" Hum," quoth the bee ; 
Buz and hum they cry, 

And so do we. 
In his ear, in his nose, 

Thus, do you see ? 
He ate the dormouse j 

Else it was he. 



84 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

If you are not able to make much out of this, lis- 
ten to what Leigh Hunt says of it : — 

It is impossible that anything could better express 
than this, either the wild and practical joking of the 
satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the 
quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and 
even harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, 
one with another. None but a boon companion, with 
a very musical ear, could have written it. — A Jar of 
Honey. 

If the reader has the key to the mood in which 
this catch is written, if he has given himself up to 
the sportive spirit in which " rare old Ben " con- 
ceived it, it is possible to find in it the merit which 
Hunt points out ; but without thus giving ourselves 
up to the leadership of the poet it is hardly possi- 
ble to make of it anything at all. The example is 
of course somewhat extreme, but the principle is 
universal. 

It is always well in a first reading to give one's 
self up to the sweep of the work ; to go forward 
without bothering over slight errors or smalt de- 
tails. Notes are not for the first or the second 
perusal so much as for the third and so on to the 
hundredth. Dr. Johnson is right when he says : — 

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary 
evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the pow- 
ers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest 
pleasures that the drama can give, read every play from 
the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all 
his commentators. When his fancy is once on the 
wing, let it not stoop to correction or explanation. 

One of the great obstacles to the enjoyment of 






METHODS OF STUDY 85 

any art is the too conscientious desire to enjoy. 
We are constantly hindered by the conventional 
responsibility to experience over each classic the 
proper emotion. The student is often so occu- 
pied in painful struggles to feel that which he has 
been told to feel that he remains utterly cold and 
unmoved. It is like going to some historic local- 
ity of noble suggestion, where an officious guide 
moves the visitor from one precious spot to an- 
other, saying in effect : " Here such an event hap- 
pened. Now thrill. Sixpence a thrill, please." 
For myself, being of a somewhat contumacious char- 
acter, I have never been able to thrill to order, 
even if a shilling instead of sixpence were the 
price of the luxury ; and in the same way I am 
unable to follow out a prescribed set of emotions 
at the command of a text-book on literature. Per- 
haps my temperament has made me unjustly skep- 
tical, but I have never been able to have much 
faith in the genuineness of feelings carried on at 
the ordering of an emotional programme. The stu- 
dent should let himself go. On the first reading, 
at least, let what will happen so you are swept 
along in full enjoyment. It is better to read with 
delight and misunderstand, than to plod forward 
in wise stupidity, understanding all and compre- 
hending nothing ; gaining the letter and failing 
utterly to achieve the spirit. The letter may be at- 
tended to at any time ; make sure first of the spirit. 
I do not mean that one is to read carelessly ; but 
I do mean that one is to read enthusiastically, joy- 
ously, and, if it be possible, even passionately. 



86 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

The best test of the completeness with which one 
has entered into the heart of a book is just this 
keenness of enjoyment. Fully to share the mood 
of the author is to share something of the delight 
of creation. It is as if in the mind of the reader 
this work of beauty and of immortal significance 
was springing into being. This enjoyment, more- 
over, increases with familiarity. If you find that 
you do not care to take up again a masterpiece be- 
cause you have read it once, you may pretty safely 
conclude that you have never truly read it at all. 
You have been over it, it may be, and gratified 
some superficial curiosity ; but you have never got 
to its heart. Does one claim to be won to the heart 
of a friend and yet to be willing never to see that 
friend more ? 

One may, of course, outgrow even a master- 
piece. There are authors who are genuine so far 
as they go, who may be enjoyed at one stage of 
growth, yet who as the student advances become 
insufficient and unattractive. The man who does 
not outgrow is not growing. One does not health- 
ily tire of a real book, however, until he has be- 
come greater than that book. The interest which 
becomes weary of a masterpiece is more than half 
curiosity, and at best is no more than intellectual. 
It is not imaginative. Margaret Fuller confessed 
that she tired of everything she read, even of 
Shakespeare. She thereby unconsciously discov- 
ered the quality of mind which prevented her from 
being a great woman instead of merely a brilliant 
one. She fed her intellect upon literature; but 



METHODS OF STUDY 87 

she failed because literature does not reach to its 
highest function unless its appeal to the intellect is 
the means of touching and arousing the imagina- 
tion ; because the end of all art is not the mind but 
the emotions. 

It may seem that enough has already been re- 
quired to make reading the most serious of under- 
takings ; yet there is still one requirement more 
which is of the utmost importance. He is unwor- 
thy to share the delights of great work who is not 
able to respect it ; he has no right to meddle with the 
best of literature who is not prepared to approach 
it with some reverence. In the greatest books the 
master minds of the race have graciously bidden 
their fellows into their high company. The honor 
should be treated according to its worth. Irrev- 
erence is the deformity of a diseased mind. The 
man who cannot revere what is noble is innately 
degraded. When writers of genius have given us 
their best thoughts, their deepest imaginings, their 
noblest emotions, it is for us to receive them with 
bared heads. He is greatly to be pitied who, in 
reading high imaginative work, has never been 
conscious of a sense of being in a fine and noble 
presence, of having been admitted into a place 
which should not be profaned. Only that soul is 
great which can appreciate greatness. Remember 
that there is no surer measure of what you are 
than the extent to which you are able to rise to 
the heights of supreme books ; the extent to which 
you are able to comprehend, to delight in, and to 
revere, the masterpieces of literature. 



VII 

THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 

Whatever intelligence man imparts to man, at 
least all beyond the crudest rudimentary begin- 
nings, must be conveyed by conventions. There 
must have been an agreement, tacit or explicit, that 
a certain sign shall stand for a certain idea ; and 
when that idea is to be expressed, this sign must 
be used. In order that the meaning of any com- 
munication may be understood, it is essential that 
the means of expression be appreciated by hearer 
as well as by speaker. We have agreed that in 
English a given sound shall represent a given idea ; 
and to one who knows this tongue the specified 
sound, either spoken or suggested by letters, calls 
that idea up. To one unacquainted with English, 
the sound is meaningless, because he is not a party 
to the agreement which has fixed for it a conven- 
tional significance ; or it may awake in his thought 
an idea entirely different, because he belongs to a 
nation where tacit agreement has fixed upon an- 
other meaning. The word " dot," for instance, has 
by English-speaking folk been appropriated to the 
notion of a trifling point or mark ; while those 
who speak French, writing and pronouncing the 
word in the same way, take it to indicate a dowry. 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 89 

In order to communicate with any man, it is neces- 
sary to know what is the set of conventions with 
which he is accustomed to convey and to receive 
ideas. 

The principle holds also in art. There is a con- 
ventional language in sound or color or form as 
there is in words. It is broader as a rule, because 
oftener founded upon general human characteris- 
tics, because more directly and obviously borrowed 
from nature, and because not so warped and dis- 
torted by those concessions to utility which have 
modified the common tongues of men. Indeed, it 
might at first thought seem that the language of 
art is universal, but a little reflection will show that 
this is not the case. The sculpture of the Aztecs, 
for instance, is in an art language utterly different 
from that of the sculpture of the Greeks. If you 
recall the elaborately intricate uncouthness of the 
gods of old Yucatan, you will easily appreciate that 
the artists who shaped these did not employ the 
same artistic conventions as did the sculptors who 
breathed life into the Venus of Melos, or who 
embodied divine serenity and beauty in the Elgin 
marbles. To the Greeks those twisted and thick- 
lipped Aztec deities, clutching one another by 
their .crests of plumes, or grasping rudely at one 
another's arms, would have conveyed no sentiment 
of beauty or of reverence ; while it is equally to 
be supposed that the Aztec would have remained 
hardly moved before the wonders of Greek sculp- 
ture. The Hellenic art conventions, it is true, 
were more directly founded upon nature, and there- 



90 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

fore more readily understood ; but even this would 
not have overcome the fact that one nation had 
one art language and the other another. Those of 
you who were at the Columbian Exposition will 
remember how the music in the Midway Plaisance 
illustrated this same point. The weird strain of 
one or another savage or barbaric folk came to the 
ear with a strangeness which showed how ignorant 
we are of the language of the music of these dwell- 
ers in far lands. To us it was bizarre or moving, 
but we could form little idea how it struck the 
hearers to whom it was native and familiar. It 
was even all but impossible to know whether a 
given strain was felt by the savage performers to 
be grave or gay. Of all the varieties of sound 
which there surprised the ear, that evolved by the 
Chinese appeared most harsh and unmelodious. 
The almond-eyed Celestial seemed to delight in a 
concatenation of crash and caterwauling, mingled 
in one infernal cacophony at which the nerves 
tingled and the hair stood on end. Yet it is on 
record that when in the early days of European 
intercourse with China, the French missionary 
Amiot played airs by Rossini and Boieldieu to a 
Chinese mandarin of intelligence and of cultiva- 
tion according to eastern standards, the Oriental 
shook his head disapprovingly. He politely ex- 
pressed his thanks for the entertainment, but when 
pressed to give an opinion of the music he was 
forced to reply : " It is sadly devoid of meaning 
and expression, while Chinese music penetrates the 
soul." After we have smiled at the absurdity, from 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 91 

our point of view, of the penetration of the soul by- 
Chinese music, we reflect that after all our music 
is probably as absurd to them as theirs to us. We 
perhaps recall the fact that even the cultivated 
Japanese, with their sensitive feeling for art, and 
their readiness to adopt occidental customs, com- 
plain of the effect of dividing music into regular 
bars, and making it, as they say, " chip-chop, chip- 
chop, chip-chop." The fact is that every civiliza- 
tion makes its art language as it makes its word 
language ; and he who would understand the mes- 
sage must understand the conventions by which it 
is expressed. 

We are apt to forget this fact of the convention- 
ality of all language. We become so accustomed 
both to the speech of ordinary intercourse and to 
that of familiar art, that we inevitably come to re- 
gard them as natural and almost universal. No lan- 
guage, however, is natural, unless it be fair to apply 
that word to the most primitive signs of savages. 
It is an arbitrary thing, and as such it must be 
learned. We acquire the ordinary tongue of our 
race almost unconsciously, and while we are too 
young to reason about it. We gain the language 
of art later and more deliberately, although of 
course we may owe much to our early surroundings 
in this as in every other respect. The point to 
be kept in mind is that we do learn it ; that it is 
not the gift of nature. This is of course true of 
all art ; but here our concern is only with the 
fact that literature has as truly its own peculiar 
language as music or painting or sculpture, — its 



92 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

language, that is, distinct from the language of 
ordinary daily or common speech. 

The conventions which serve efficiently to convey 
ordinary ideas and matter-of-fact statements, are 
not sufficient for the expression of emotions. The 
man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, 
the amount of coal consumed in a locomotive en- 
gine, or the effect of political complications upon 
the stock-market, is able to serve himself suffi- 
ciently well with ordinary language. The novelist 
who has to tell of the bewitchingly willful worldli- 
ness of Beatrix Esmond, of the fateful and tragic 
experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splen- 
didly real impossibilities of the career of D'Artag- 
nan and his three friends, the passion of Richard 
Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius 
for Cosette ; the dramatist who endeavors to make 
his readers share the emotions of Lear and Cor- 
delia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and 
Juliet ; the poet who would picture the emotions 
of Pompilia, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Por- 
phyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia, — 
all these require an especial language. 

The conveying from mind to mind of emotion 
is a delicate task. It is not difficult to make a 
man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor 
to share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment 
of transcendent feeling, and you have an under- 
taking so complex, and so all but impossible, that 
if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly 
call yourself the first writer of your age. This is 
the making of the intangible tangible ; the highest 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 93 

creative act of the imagination. The cleverness 
and the skill of man have been exhausted in devis- 
ing means to impart to readers the thought and 
feeling, the passion and emotion, which sway the 
hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to 
go into those devices which belong especially to 
the domain of rhetoric, — the mechanics of style. 
They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books 
by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us 
have learned, and which all of us have forgotten. 
It is not with them that I am here concerned. 
They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. 
It is with those matters which appeal to the con- 
scious understanding that we have now to do ; the 
conventions which are the language of literature 
as Latin was the language of Caesar or Greek the 
tongue of Pericles. 

I have spoken already of the necessity of under- 
standing what is said in literature; this is, how- 
ever, by no means the whole of the matter. It is 
of even greater importance to be clearly aware of 
what is implied. We test the imaginative quality 
of what is written by its power of suggestion. 
The writer who has imagination will have so much 
to say that he is forced to make a phrase call up a 
whole train of thought, a word bring vividly to the 
mind of the reader a picture or a history. This 
is what critics mean when they speak of the mar- 
velous condensation of Shakespeare ; and in either 
prose or verse the criterion of imaginative writing 
is whether it is suggestive. Imagination is the 
realizing faculty. It is the power of receiving as 



94 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

true the ideal. It is the accepting as actual that 
which is conjured up by the inner vision; the 
making vital, palpitant, and present that which is 
known to be materially but a dream. That which 
is written when the poet sees the unseen palpably 
before his inner eye is so filled with the vitality 
and actuality of his vision that it fills the mind of 
the reader as a tenth wave floods and overflows a 
hollow in the rocks of the shore. When Keats 
says of the song of the nightingale that it is 

The same that oft-times hath 
Charm' d magic easements, opening- on the foam 
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn, 

all the romance and witchery of fae^-lore are in 
this single phrase. The reader feels the glow of 
delight, the fascination of old tales which have 
pleased mankind from the childhood of the race. 
Into two lines the poet has condensed the fragrance 
of a thousand flowers of folk-lore. 

In the best literature what is said directly is 
often of less importance than what is meant but 
not said. In dealing with imaginative writers, it 
is necessary to keep always in mind the fact that 
the literal meaning is but a part, and often not 
the greater part. The implied, the indirect, is 
apt to be that for the sake of which the work is 
written. 

In its earlier stages all language is largely made 
up of comparisons. The fact that every tongue 
is full of fossil similes has been constantly com- 
mented upon, and this fact serves to illustrate how 
greatly the force of a word may be diminished jf 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 95 

its original meaning is lost sight of. If, in ordi- 
nary conversation, to take a common illustration, 
some old-fashioned body now speak of a clergyman 
as a " pastor," it is to be feared that the word con- 
notes little, unless it be a suspicion of rustic seedi- 
ness in apparel, a certain provincial narrowness, 
and perhaps a conventional piety. When the 
word was still in its prime, it carried with it the 
force of its derivation ; it spoke eloquently of one 
who ministered spiritual food to his followers, as a 
shepherd ministers to his flock. A pastor may now 
be as good as a pastor was then, but the title has 
ceased to do him justice. The freshness and force 
of words get worn off in time, as does by much use 
the sharpness of outline of a coin. We need con- 
stantly to guard against this tendency of language. 
We speak commonly enough in casual conversation 
of " a sardonic smile," but the idea conveyed is no 
more than that of a forced and heartless grin. As 
far back as the days of Homer, some imaginative 
man compared the artificial and sinister smile of a 
cynic to the distortions and convulsions produced 
by a poisonous herb in Sardinia ; and from its very 
persistence we may fancy how forcible and striking 
was the comparison in its freshness. Of course, 
modern writers do not necessarily keep in mind 
the derivation of every word and phrase which they 
employ ; but they do at least use terms with so 
much care for propriety and exactness that it is 
impossible to seize the whole of their meaning, 
unless we appreciate the niceties of their language. 
Ruskin says rightly : -«■ 



96 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

You must get yourself into the habit of looking 
intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their 
meaning, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. . . . 
You might read all the books in the British Museum 
(if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly 
" illiterate, " uneducated person ; but if you read ten 
pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, 
with real accuracy, — you are forevermore in some 
measure an educated person. — Of Kings' Treasuries. 

Unless our attention has been especially called to 
the fact, there are few of us who at all realize how 
carelessly it is possible to read. We begin in the 
nursery to let words pass without attaching to 
them any idea which is really clear. We nourish 
our infant imaginations upon Mother Goose, and 
are content to go all our days in ignorance even of 
the meaning of a good many of the words so fondly 
familiar in pinafore days. We are all acquainted 
with the true and thrilling tale how 

Thomas T. Tattamus took two tees 
To tie two tups up to two tall trees ; 

but how many of us know what either a " tee " or 
a " tup " is ? We have all been stirred in our sus- 
ceptible youth by the rhyme wherein is recounted 
the exciting adventure of the four and twenty tail- 
ors who set forth to slay a snail, but who retreated 
in precipitate confusion when 

She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow ; 

but it is to be feared that the proportion of us is 
not large who have taken the trouble to ascertain 
what is a Kyloe cow. Or take the well-worn 
ditty : — 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 97 

Cross-patch, 
Draw the latch, 
Sit by the fire and spin. 

Have you ever stopped to reflect that " draw the 
latch" means to pull in the latch-string, and that 
in the days of homely general hospitality to which 
this contrivance belonged the image presented by 
the verse was that of a misanthropic hag, shutting 
herself off from her neighbors and sulking viciously 
by her fire behind a door rudely insulting the caller 
with the empty hole of the latch-string ? 

Perhaps this seems trifling; and it may easily be 
insisted that these rhymes become familiar to us 
while we are still too young to think of the exact 
meaning of anything. The question then is whether 
we do better when we are older. We are accus- 
tomed, very likely, to hear in common speech the 
phrase " pay through the nose." Do you know 
what that means, or that it goes back to the days 
of the Druids ? When you hear the phrase " where 
the shoe pinches" do you recall Plutarch's story? 
Does the anecdote of St. Ambrose come to mind 
when the saying is "At Rome do as the Romans 
do " ? It happens every few years that the news- 
papers are full of more or less excited talk about a 
" gerrymander." Does the word bring before the 
inner eye that uncouth monster wherewith the 
caricaturist of his day vexed the soul of Governor 
Gerry ? I have tried to select examples which are 
not remote from the talk of every day. It seems 
to me that these illustrate well enough how apt we 
are to accept words and phrases as we accept a 



98 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

silver dollar, with very little idea of the intrinsic 
worth of what we are getting. This may be made 
to do well enough in practical buying and selling, 
but it is eminently unsatisfactory in matters intel- 
lectual or aesthetic. In the study of literature ap- 
proximations are apt to be pretty nearly worthless. 

The most obvious characteristic in literary lan- 
guage is that of allusion. Constantly does the 
reader of imaginative works encounter allusions to 
the Bible, to mythology, to history, to folk-lore, and 
to literature itself. To comprehend an author it 
is needful to realize fully what he had in mind 
when using these. They are the symbols of 
thoughts and feelings which are not to be ex- 
pressed in ordinary ways. When we are familiar 
with the matter alluded to we see by the sudden 
and vivid light which is cast over the page by the 
comparison or the suggestion how expressive and 
comprehensive this form of language may be. To 
the reader who is ignorant the allusion is of course 
a stumbling-block and a rock of offense. It is like 
a sentence in an unknown tongue, which not only 
conceals its meaning but gives one an irritated 
sense of being shut out of the author's counsels. 

It is probable that in English literature the 
allusions to the Bible are more numerous than any 
other. We shall have occasion later to speak of 
the place and influence of the King James version 
upon the literature of our tongue, and here we have 
to do only with those cases in which a scriptural 
reference is made part of the special language of 
an author. Again and again it happens that a 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 99 

writer takes advantage of the associations which, 
cluster about a phrase or an incident of the Bible, 
and by a simple touch brings up in the mind of the 
understanding reader all the sentiments connected 
with the original. 

With many of the more common of these phrases 
it is impossible for any one who associates with 
educated persons not to be familiar. They have 
become part and parcel of the common speech of 
the time. We speak of the " widow's mite," of a 
" Judas' kiss," of " the flesh-pots of Egypt," of " a 
still, small voice," of a "Jehu," a " perfect Babel," 
a " Nimrod," of " bread upon the waters," and of a 
"Delilah." The phrases have to a considerable 
extent acquired their own meaning, so that even 
one who is not familiar with the Scriptures is not 
likely to have difficulty in getting from them a 
general idea. To the reader who is acquainted 
with the force and origin of these terms, however, 
they have a vigor and significance which for others 
they must lack. The name Jehu brings up to him 
not merely a driver on a New England stage-coach, 
but the figure of the newly crowned usurper rush- 
ing down to the slaughter of King Joram, his mas- 
ter, when the watchman upon the wall looked out 
and said : " The driving is like the driving of Jehu, 
the son of Nimshi ; for he driveth furiously." The 
phrase " bread upon the waters " affords a good 
illustration here. Perhaps most readers are likely 
to know the origin of the quotation, and probably 
the promise which concludes it. The number is 
smaller who realize the figure to be that of the 



100 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

oriental farmer casting abroad the seed-rice over 
flooded fields, sowing for the harvest which he 
shall find " after many days." The phrase " a still, 
small voice " has become dulled by common use, 
— one might almost say profane, since the quota- 
tion is of a quality which should render it too dig- 
nified and noble for careless employment. It speaks 
to the reader who knows its origin of that magnifi- 
cently impressive scene on Horeb when Elijah stood 
on the mount before the Lord : — 

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and 
strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces 
the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in 
the wind : and after the wind an earthquake ; but the 
Lord was not in the earthquake : and after the earth- 
quake a fire ; but the Lord was not in the fire : and 
after the fire a still, small voice. And it was so, 
when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his 
mantle, and went out and stood in the entering in of 
the cave. And behold, there came a voice unto him, 
and said : " What doest thou here, Elijah ? " — 1 Kings 
xix. 11-13. 

It is not necessary to dwell upon this class of al- 
lusions. The reader who expects to get from them 
their full force must know the original ; and while 
in ordinary speech these phrases are used care- 
lessly and with little regard for their full signifi- 
cance, they are in the work of imaginative writers 
to be taken for all that they can and should convey. 

There are other Biblical allusions which are less 
common and less obvious. When in the " Ode on 
the Nativity," Milton speaks of 

that twice batter'd god of Palestine, 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 101 

the verse means much to the reader who recalls the 
double fall of the fish-tailed god Dagon before the 
captured ark of Israel, but to others it is likely 
to mean nothing whatever. To be ignorant of the 
tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego is to 
miss completely the force of Hazlitt's remark that 
certain artists are so absorbed in their own pro- 
ductions that " they walked through collections of 
the finest works like the Children in the Fiery 
Furnace, untouched, unapproached." Not to know 
the declaration of St. Paul of what he had suffered 
for his faith 1 is to lose the point of Tennyson's 
verse 

Not in vain, 
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death. 

Prose and poetry are alike full of scriptural phrase- 
ology. In short, for the understanding of the lan- 
guage of allusion in English literature a knowledge 
of the English Bible is neither more nor less than 
essential. 

Another class of allusions frequent in literature 
is the mythological. Here also we find phrases 
which have passed so completely into every-day 
currency that we hear and use them almost with- 
out reflecting upon their origin. "Scylla and 
Charybdis," "dark as Erebus," "hydra-headed," 
and " Pandora's box," are familiar examples. We 
speak of " a herculean task " without in the least 
calling to mind the labors of Hercules, and employ 
the phrase " the thread of life " without seeming 

1 If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at 
Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not ? — 1 Cor. 
xv. 32. 



102 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

to see the three grisly Fates, spinning in the chill 
gray dusk of their cave. We have gone so far 
as to condense a whole legend into a single word, 
and then to ignore the story. We say " lethean," 
" mercurial," " aurora," and " bacchanalian," with- 
out recalling their real significance. It is obvious 
how a perception of the original meaning of these 
terms must impart vividness to their use or to their 
understanding. There are innumerable instances, 
more particular, in which it is essential to know 
the force of a reference to old myths, lest the finer 
meaning of the author be altogether missed. In 
" The Wind-Harp " Lowell wrote : — 

I treasure in secret some long-, fine hair 

Of tenderest brown . . . 
I twisted this magic in gossamer strings 

Over a wind-harp's Delphian hollow. 

In the phrase "a wind-harp's Delphian hollow" 
the poet has suggested all the mysterious and fate- 
ful utterances of the abyss from which the Delphic 
priestess sucked up prophecies, and he has pre- 
pared the comprehending reader for the oracular 
murmur which swells from the instrument upon 
which have been stretched chords twisted from the 
hair of the dead loved one. To miss this suggestion 
is to lose a vital part of the poem. When Keats 
writes of " valley-lilies whiter still than Leda's 
love," unless there come instantly to the mind the 
image of the snowy swan whose form Jove took to 
win Leda, the phrase means nothing. The woeful 
cry in "Antony and Cleopatra," 

The shirt of Nessus is upon me ; teach me, 
Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage, 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 103 

is full of keen-edged horror when one recalls the 
garment poisoned with his own blood by which the 
centaur avenged himself on Hercules. In a flash 
it brings up the picture of the demigod tearing his 
flesh in more than mortal agony, and calling to 
Philoctetes to light the funeral pyre that he might 
be consumed alive. It is not needful to multiply 
examples since they so frequently present them- 
selves to the reader. The only point to be made 
is that here we have another well defined division 
of literary language. 

Allusion to history is another characteristic form 
of the language of literature. References to classic 
story are perhaps more common than those to gen- 
eral or modern, but both are plentiful. Sometimes 
the form is that of a familiar phrase, as " a Cad- 
mean victory," " a Procrustean bed," " a crusade," 
"a Waterloo," and so on. Phrases like these are 
easily understood, although it is hardly possible to 
get their full effect without a knowledge of their 
origin. What, however, would this passage in 
Gray's " Elegy " convey to one unfamiliar with 
English history ? — 

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast 
The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; 

Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest ; 
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood. 

It is necessary to know about the majestic figure 
of ivory and gold which the Athenian sculptor 
wrought, or one misses the meaning of Emerson's 
couplet, — 

Not from a vain or shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought. 



104 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Shakespeare abounds in examples of this use of 
allusions to history to produce a clear or vivid im- 
pression of some emotion or thought. 

I will make a Star-chamber matter of it. 

Merry Wives, i. 1. 
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable. 

Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 
Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, 
So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, 
Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, 
And would have told bim half his Troy was burnt. 

2 Henry IV., i. 1. 

The reader must know something of the Star-cham- 
ber, of the gravity and wisdom of Nestor, of the 
circumstances of the tragic destruction of Troy, or 
these passages can have little meaning for him. 

Sometimes references of this class are less evi- 
dent, as where Byron speaks of 

The starry Galileo with his woes ; 

or where Poe finely compresses the whole splendid 
story of antiquity into a couple of lines : — 

To the glory that was Greece 
And the grandeur that was Rome. 

If we have in mind the varied and inspiring story 
of Greece and Eome, these lines unroll before us 
like a matchless panorama. We linger over them 
to let the imagination realize the full richness of 
their suggestion. The heart beats more quickly, 
and we find ourselves murmuring over and over 
to ourselves with a kindling sense of warmth and 
glow : — 

To the glory that was Greece 
And the grandeur that was Rome. 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 105 

Poe affords an excellent example of this device of 
historical allusion carried to its extreme. In " The 
Fall of the House of Usher," there is a stanza, 
which reads : — 

Wanderers in that happy valley 

Through two luminous windows saw 

Spirits moving musically 
To a lute's well-tuned law, 

Round about a throne, where sitting 
(Porphyrogene !) 

In state his glory well-befitting, 
The ruler of the realm was seen. 

If the reader chance to know that in the great 
palace of Constantine the Great at Constantinople 
there was a building of red porphyry, which by 
special decree was made sacred to motherhood, and 
that here the princes of the blood were born, be- 
ing in recognition called "porphyrogene," there 
will come to him the vision which Poe desired to 
evoke. The word will suggest the regal splendors 
of the Byzantine court at a time when the whole 
world babbled of its glories, and will give to the 
verse a richness of atmosphere which could hardly 
be produced by any piling up of specific details. 
The reader who is not in possession of this infor- 
mation can only stumble over the word as I did 
in my youth, with an aggrieved feeling of being 
shut out from the inner mysteries of the poem. I 
spoke of this as an extreme instance of the use of 
this form of literary language, because the know- 
ledge needed to render it intelligible is more un- 
usual and special than that generally appealed to 
by writers. It is one of those bold strokes which 



106 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

are tremendously effective when they succeed, but 
which are likely to fail with the ordinary reader. 

After historic allusion comes that to folk-lore, 
which used to be a good deal appealed to by ima- 
ginative writers. Some knowledge of old beliefs 
is often essential to the comprehension of earlier 
authors. Suckling, for instance, says very charm- 
ingly : — 

But oh, she dances such a way ! 
No sun upon an Easter day 
Is half so fine a sight ! 

The reference, of course, is to the superstition that 
the sun on Easter morning danced for joy at the 
coming of the day when the Lord arose. To get 
the force of the passage, it is necessary to put one's 
self into the mood of those who believed this 
pretty legend. In the same way it is only to one 
who is acquainted with the myth of the lubber 
fiend, the spirit who did the work of the farm at 
night for the wage of a bowl of cream set for him 
beside the kitchen fire, that there is meaning in 
the lines in " L'Allegro : " — 

Tells how the grudging goblin sweat 
To earn his cream-bowl duly set, 
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, 
His shadowy flail hath thresh' d the corn 
That ten day- laborers could not end ; 
And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, 
Basks at the fire his hairy strength ; 
And crop-full out of doors he flings, 
Ere the first cock his matin rings. 

There is much of this folk-lore language in Shake- 
speare, and in our own time Browning has perhaps 
more of it than any other prominent author. It 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 107 

may be remarked in passing, that Browning, who 
loved odd books and read a good many strange old 
works which are not within general reach, is more 
difficult in this matter of allusion than any other 
contemporary. References of this class are gener- 
ally a trouble to the ordinary reader, and especially 
are young students likely to be unable to under- 
stand them readily. 

The last class of allusions, and one which in 
books written to-day is especially common, is that 
which calls up passages or characters in literature 
itself. We speak of a " quixotic deed ; " we allude 
to a thing as to be taken " in a Pickwickian sense ; " 
we have become so accustomed to hearing a married 
man spoken of as a " Benedick," that we often 
forget the brisk and gallant bachelor of " Much 
Ado about Nothing," and how he was transformed 
into " Benedick the married man " almost without 
his own consent. When an author who weighs 
his words employs allusions of this sort, it is need- 
ful to know the originals well if we hope to get 
the real intent of what is written. In "II Pen- 
seroso," Milton says : — 

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptered pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine. 

There should pass before the mind of the reader 
all the fateful story of the ill-starred house of Lab- 
dacus : the horrible history of CEdipus, involved 
in the meshes of destiny ; the deadly strife of his 
sons, and the sublime self-sacrifice of Antigone ; 



108 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

all the involved and passionate tragedies of the de- 
scendants of Pelops : Agamemnon, the slaughter 
of Iphigenia, the vengeance of Clytemnestra, the 
waiting of Electra, the matricide of Orestes and 
the descent of the Furies upon him ; and after this 
should come to mind the oft-told tale of Troy in 
all its fullness. Milton was not one to use words 
inadvertently or without a clear sense of all that 
they implied. He desired to suggest all the rich 
and tragic histories which I have hinted at, to move 
the reader, and to show how stirring and how preg- 
nant is tragedy when dealing with high themes. 
In two lines he evokes all that is most potent in 
Grecian poetry. Or again, when Wordsworth 
speaks of 

The gentle Lady married to the Moor, 

And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamh, 

it is not enough to glance at a foot-note and dis- 
cover that the allusion is to Desdemona, and to 
the first canto of Spenser's " Faerie Queene." The 
reader is expected to be so familiar with the poems 
referred to that the spirit of one and then of the 
other comes up to him in all its beauty. An allu- 
sion of this sort should be like a breath of perfume 
which suddenly calls up some dear and thrilling 
memory. 

Enough has been said to show that the language 
of literature is a complicated and in some respects 
a difficult one. Literature in its highest and best 
sense is of an importance and of a value so great 
as to justify the assumption that no difficulties of 
language are too great if needed for the full ex- 



THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 109 

pression of the message which genius bears to man- 
kind. In other words, the writer who can give to 
his fellows works which are genuinely imaginative 
is justified in employing any conventions which 
will really aid in expression. It is the part of his 
readers to acquaint themselves with the means 
which he finds it best to employ ; and to be grate- 
ful for the gift of the master, whatever the trouble 
it costs to appreciate and to enter into its spirit. 
If we are wise, if we have a proper sense of val- 
ues, we shall find it worth our while to familiarize 
ourselves with scriptural phrases, with mythology, 
history, folk-lore, or whatever will aid us in seizing 
the innermost significance of masterpieces. 

It is important, moreover, to know literary lan- 
guage before the moment comes for using it. In- 
formation grubbed from foot-notes at the instant of 
need may be better than continued ignorance, but 
it is impossible to thrill and tingle over a passage 
in the middle of which allusions must be looked 
up in the comments of the editor. It is like feel- 
ing one's way through a poem in a foreign tongue 
when one must use a lexicon for every second 
word. The feelings cannot carry the reader away 
if they must bear not only the intangible imagi- 
nation but a solidly material dictionary. As has 
been said in a former page, notes should not be 
allowed to interrupt a first reading. It is often a 
wise plan to study them beforehand, so as to have 
their aid at once. It is certainly idle to expect a 
vivid first impression if one stops continually to 
look up obscure points ; one cannot soar to the 
stars with foot-notes as a flying-machine. 



110 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

One danger must here be noted. The student 
may so fill his mind with concern about the lan- 
guage that he cannot give himself up to the author. 
The language is for the work, and not the work 
for the language. The teacher who does not in- 
struct the student in the meaning and value of 
allusion fails of his mission ; but the teacher who 
makes this the limit, and fails to impress upon the 
learner the fact that all this is a means to an end, 
commits a crime. I had rather intrust a youth to 
an instructor ill-informed in the things of which 
we have been speaking, and filled with a genuine 
love and reverence for beauty as far as he could ap- 
prehend it, than to a preceptor completely equipped 
with erudition, and filled with Philistine satisfac- 
tion over this knowledge for its own sake. No 
amount of learning can compensate for a lack of 
enthusiasm. The object of reading literature is 
not only to understand it, but to experience it ; 
not only to apprehend it with the intellect, but to 
comprehend it with the emotions. To understand 
it is necessary and highly important ; but this is 
not the best thing. When the gods send us gifts, 
let us not be content with examining the caskets. 



VIII 

THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 

We have spoken of the tangible language of 
literature ; we have now to do with that which is 
intangible. Open and direct allusion is neither 
the more important nor the more common form of 
suggestion. He who has trained himself to recog- 
nize references to things historical, mythological, 
and so on, has not necessarily become fully familiar 
with literary language. Phrase by phrase, and 
word by word, literature is a succession of symbols. 
The aim of the imaginative writer is constantly to 
excite the reader to an act of creation. He only 
is a poet who can arouse in the mind a creative 
imagination. Indeed, one is tempted to indulge 
here in an impossible paradox, and to say that he 
only is a poet who can for the time being make 
his reader a poet also. The object of that which is 
expressed is to arouse the intellect and the emo- 
tions to search for that which is not expressed. 
The language of allusion is directed to this end, 
but literature has also its means far more subtile 
and far more effective. 

Suggestion is still the essence of this, but it is 
suggestion conveyed more delicately and impalpa- 
bly. Sometimes it is so elusive as almost to seem 



112 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

accidental or even fanciful. The choice of a single 
word gives to a sentence a character which without 
it would be entirely wanting ; a simple epithet 
modifies an entire passage. In Lincoln's " Gettys- 
burg Address," for instance, after the so concise 
and forceful statement of all that has brought the 
assembly together, the speaker declares " that we 
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have 
died in vain." The adverb is the last of which an 
ordinary mind might have thought in this connec- 
tion, and yet once spoken, it is the one inevitable 
and supreme word. It lifts the mind at once into 
an atmosphere elevated and noble. By this single 
word Lincoln seems to say : " With the dead at 
our feet, and the future for which they died before 
us, lifted by the consciousness of all that their 
death meant, of all that hangs upon the fidelity with 
which we carry forward the ideals for which they 
laid down life itself, we 4 highly resolve that their 
death shall not have been in vain.' ' : The phrase 
is one of the most superb in American literature. 
It is in itself a trumpet-blast clear and strong. 
Or take Shakespeare's epithet when he speaks of 
" death's dateless night." To the appreciative 
reader this is a word to catch the breath, and to 
touch one with the horror of that dull darkness 
where time has ceased ; where for the sleeper there 
is neither end nor beginning, no point distin- 
guished from another ; night from which all that 
makes life has been utterly swept away. " Death's 
dateless night " ! 

It is told of Keats that in reading Spenser he 



THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 113 

shouted aloud in delight over the phrase "sea- 
shouldering whales." The imagination is taken 
captive by the vigor and vividness of the image of 
the great monsters shouldering their mighty way 
through opposing waves as a giant might push his 
path through a press of armed men, forging on- 
ward by sheer force and bulk. The single word 
says more than pages of ordinary, matter-of-fact 
description. The reader who cannot appreciate 
why Keats cried out over this can hardly be said 
to have begun truly to understand the effect of the 
epithet in imaginative writing. 

Hazlitt cites the lines of Milton : — 

Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat 
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks 
Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams ; 

and comments : " The word lucid here gives to the 
idea all the sparkling effect of the most perfect 
landscape." In each of the following passages 
from Shakespeare the single italicized word is in 
itself sufficient to give distinction : — 

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber. 

Julius Ccesar, ii. 1. 

When love begins to sicken and decay 
It useth an enforced ceremony. 

lb., iv. 2. 
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well. 

Macbeth, iii. 2. 

It would lead too far to enter upon the suggest- 
iveness which is the result of skillful use of tech- 
nical means ; but I cannot resist the temptation to 
call attention to the great effect which may result 
from a wise repetition of a single word, even if 



114 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

that word be in itself commonplace. I know of 
nothing else in all literature where so tremendous 
an effect is produced by simple means as by the 
use of this device is given in the familiar lines : — 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day 
To the last syllable of recorded time. 

Macbeth, v. 5. 

The suggestion of heart-sick realization of the fol- 
lowing of one day of anguish after another seems 
to sum up in a moment all the woe of years until 
it is almost more than can be borne. 

In many passages appreciation is all but im- 
possible unless the language of suggestion is com- 
prehended. To a dullard there is little or nothing 
in the line of Chaucer : — 

Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye. 

It is constantly as important to read what is not 
written as what is set down. Lowell remarks of 
Chaucer : " Sometimes he describes amply by the 
merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting him- 
self softly down, drives away the cat. We know 
without need of more words that he has chosen the 
snuggest corner." The richest passages in litera- 
ture are precisely those which mean so much that 
to the careless or the obtuse reader they seem to 
mean nothing. 

The great principle of the need of complete com- 
prehension of which we have spoken before meets 
us here and everywhere. It is necessary to read 
with a mind so receptive as almost to be creative : 
creative, that is, in the sense of being able to evoke 



THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 115 

before the imagination of the reader those things 
which have been present to the inner vision of 
the writer. The comprehension of literary lan- 
guage is above all else the power of translating 
suggestion into imaginative reality. 
When we read, for instance : — 

Like waiting nymphs the trees present their fruit ; 

the line means nothing to us unless we are able 
with the eye of the mind to see the sentient trees 
holding out their branches like living arms, tender- 
ing their fruits. When Dekker says of patience : — 

' T is the perpetual prisoner's liberty, 
His walks and orchards ; 

we do not hold the poet's meaning unless there has 
come to us a lively sense of how the wretch con- 
demned to life-long captivity may by patience find 
in the midst of his durance the same buoyant joy 
which swells in the heart of one who goes with 
the free step of a master along his own walks and 
through his richly fruited orchards. 

Almost any page of Shakespeare might be given 
bodily here in illustration. Take, for instance, the 
talk of Lorenzo and Jessica as in the moonlit gar- 
den at Belmont they await the return of Portia. 

Lor. The moon shines "bright. In such a night as this, 
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise, — in such a night 
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, 
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, 
Where Cressid lay that night. 

Jes. In such a night 

Did Thishe fearfully o'ertrip the dew, 
And saw the lion's shadow ere himself, 
And ran dismayed away. 



116 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Lor. In such a night 

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
To come again to Carthage. 

Jes. In such a night 

Medea gathered the enchanted herbs 
That did renew old iEson. 

The question is how this is read. Do we go over 
the enchanting scene mechanically and at speed, 
as if it were the account of a political disturbance 
on the borders of Beloochistan ? Do we take in 
the ideas with crude apprehension, satisfied that we 
are doing our duty to ourselves and to literature 
because the book which we are thus abusing is 
Shakespeare ? That is one way not to read. Again, 
we may, with laborious pedantry, discover that all 
the stories alluded to in this passage are from Chau- 
cer's " Legends of Good Women ; " that for a 
single particular Shakespeare has apparently gone 
to Gower, but that most of the details he has in- 
vented himself. We may look up the accounts of 
the legendary personages mentioned, compare par- 
allel passages in which they are named, and hunt 
for the earliest reference to the willow as a sign 
of woe. There is nothing necessarily vicious in 
all this. It is a sort of busy idleness which is 
somewhat demoralizing to the mind, but it is not 
criminal. It has, it is true, no especial relation to 
the genuine and proper enjoyment of the poetry. 
That is a different affair ! The reader should luxu- 
riate through the exquisite verse, letting the im- 
agination create fully every image, every emotion. 
The sense should be steeped in the beauty of that 



THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 117 

garden, softly distinct in the golden splendors of 
the moon ; there should come again the feeling 
which has stolen over us on some June night, so 
lovely that it seemed impossible but that dreams 
should come true, and in sheer delight of the time 
we have involuntarily sighed, " In such a night as 
this ! " — as if all that is bewitching and romantic 
might happen when earth and heaven were attuned 
to harmony so complete. We should take in the 
full mood of the lines : — 

When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise. 

The image of the amorous wind, subduing its riot- 
ous glee lest it be overheard, and stealing as it 
were on tiptoe to kiss the trees, warm and willing 
in the sweet-scented dusk, makes in the mind the 
very atmosphere of the sensuous, luscious, moonlit 
garden at Belmont. We are ready to give our 
fancy over to the mood of the lovers, and with them 
to call up the potent images of folk immortal in 
the old tales : — 

In such a night 
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, 
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, 
Where Cressid lay that night. 

If we share the imaginings of the poet, we shall 
seem to see before us the sheen of the weather- 
stained Grecian tents, silvered by the moonlight 
there below the wall where we stand, — we shall 
seem to stretch unavailing arms toward that far 
corner of the camp where Cressid must be sleep- 
ing, — we shall feel a sigh swell our bosom, and 
our throat contract. 



118 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

In such a night 
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew, 
And saw the lion's shadow ere himself, 
And ran dismayed away. 

The realizing reader moves with timorous eager- 
ness to meet Pyramus, feeling under foot the dew- 
wet grass and on the cheek the soft night wind, 
and suddenly, with that awful chill of fright which 
is like an actual grasp upon the heart, to see the 
shadow of the lion silhouetted on the turf. He 
sees with the double vision of the imagination the 
shrinking, terror-smitten Thisbe, arrested by the 
shadow at her feet, while also he seems to look 
through her eyes at the beast which has called up 
her gaze from the shade to the reality. He trem- 
bles with her in a brief-long instant, and then flees 
in dismay. 

Now all this is almost sure to seem to you to 
be rather closely allied to that pest of teachers of 
composition which is known as " fine writing." I 
realize that my comment obscures the text with 
what is likely to seem a mist of sentimentality. 
There are two reasons why this should be so, — 
two, I mean, besides the obvious necessity of fail- 
ure when we attempt to translate Shakespeare into 
our own language. In the first place, the feelings 
involved belong to the elevated, poetic mood, and 
not at all to dry lecturing. In the second place, and 
what is of more importance, these emotions can be 
fairly and effectively conveyed only by suggestion. 
It is not by specifying love, passion, hate, fear, 
suspense, and the like, that an author brings them 



THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 119 

keenly to the mind ; but by arousing the reader's 
imagination to create them. It follows that in in- 
sisting upon the necessity of understanding what is 
connoted as well as what is denoted in what one 
reads, I am but calling attention to the fact that 
this is the only way in which the most significant 
message of a writer may be understood at all. The 
best of literature must be received by suggestion or 
missed altogether. 

Often ideas which are essential to the apprecia- 
tion of even the simplest import of a work are con- 
veyed purely by inference. Doubtless most of you 
are familiar with Rossetti's poem, " Sister Helen." 
A slighted maiden is by witchcraft doing to death 
her faithless lover, melting his waxen image before 
the fire, while he in agony afar wastes away under 
the eyes of his newly wedded bride as the wax 
wastes by the flame. Her brother from the gal- 
lery outside her tower window calls to her as one 
after another the relatives of the dying man come 
to implore her mercy. The first is announced in 
these words : — 

Oh, it 's Keith of Eastholm rides so fast, . . . 
For I know the white mane on the blast. 

There follows the plea of the rider, and again the 
brother speaks : — 

Here 's Keith of Westholm riding- fast, . . . 
For I know the white plume on the blast. 

When the second suppliant has vainly prayed pity, 
and the third appears, the boy calls to his sister : — 

Oh, it 's Keith of Keith now that rides fast, . . . 
For I know the white hair on the blast. 



120 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

We see first a rider who is not of importance enough 
to overpower in the mind of the boy the effect of 
his horse, and we feel instinctively that some 
younger member of the house has been sent on 
this errand. Then comes the second brother, and 
the boy is impressed by the knightly plume, by the 
trappings of the rider rather than by his person- 
ality. An older and more important member of 
the family has been dispatched as the need has 
grown greater. It is not, however, until the old 
man comes, with white locks floating on the wind, 
that the person of the messenger seizes the atten- 
tion ; it is evident that the head of the house of 
Keith has come, and that a desperate climax is at 
hand. 

When one considers the care with which writers 
arrange details like this, of how much depends 
upon the reader's comprehending them, one knows 
not whether to be the more angry or the more pit- 
iful in thinking of the careless fashion in which 
literature is so commonly skimmed over. 

It is essential, then, to read carefully and intel- 
ligently; and it is no less essential to read im- 
aginatively and sympathetically. Of course the 
intelligent comprehension of which I am speaking 
cannot be reached' without the use of the imagi- 
nation. No author can fulfill for you the office 
of your own mind. In order to accompany an 
author who soars it is necessary to have wings of 
one's own. Pegasus is a sure guide through the 
trackless regions of the sky, but he drags none up 
after him. The majority of readers are apt un- 



THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 121 

consciously to assume that a work of imaginative 
literature is a sort of captive balloon in which any 
excursionist who is in search of a novel sensation 
may be wafted heavenward for the payment of a 
small fee. They sit down to some famous book 
prepared to be raised far above earth, and they are 
not only astonished but inclined to be indignant 
that nothing happens. They feel that they have 
been defrauded, and that like the prophet Jonah 
they do well to be angry. The reputation of the 
masterpiece they regard as a sort of advertise- 
ment from which the book cannot fall away with- 
out manifest dishonesty on the part of somebody. 
They are there ; they are ready to be thrilled ; the 
reputation of the work guarantees the thrilling; 
and yet they are unmoved. Straightway they pro- 
nounce the reputation of that book a snare and a 
delusion. They do not in the least appreciate the 
fact that they have not even learned the language 
in which the author has written. Literature shows 
us what we may create for ourselves ; it suggests 
and inspires ; it awakens us to the possibilities of 
life; but the actual act of creation must every 
mind do for itself. The hearing ear and the re- 
sponsive imagination are as necessary as the in- 
spired voice to utter high things. You are able 
appreciatively to read imaginative works when you 
are able, as William Blake has said : — 

To see the world in a grain of sand, 

And a heaven in a wild flower ; 
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And eternity in an hour. 



122 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

The language of literature is in reality a tongue 
as foreign to every-day speech as is the tongue of 
the folk of another land. It is necessary to learn 
it as one learns a foreign idiom ; and to appreciate 
the fact that even when it is acquired what we read 
does not accomplish for us the possibilities of emo- 
tion, but only points out the way in which we may 
rise to them for ourselves. 



IX 

THE CLASSICS 

The real nature of a classic is perhaps to the 
general mind even more vague than that of litera- 
ture. As long as the term is confined to Greek 
and Roman authors, it is of course simple enough ; 
but the moment the word is given its general and 
legitimate application the ordinary reader is apt to 
become somewhat uncertain of its precise mean- 
ing. It is not strange, human nature being what 
it is, that the natural instinct of most men is to 
take refuge in the idea that a classic is of so little 
moment that it really does not matter much what 
it is. 

While I was writing these talks, a friend said to 
me : "I know what I would do if I were to speak 
about literature. I would tell my audience squarely 
that all this talk about the superiority of the classics 
is either superstition or mere affectation. I would 
give them the straight tip that nobody nowadays 
really enjoys Homer and Chaucer and Spenser 
and all those old duffers, and that nobody need ex- 
pect to." I disregarded the slang, and endeavored 
to treat this remark with absolute sincerity. It 
brought up vividly the question which has oc- 
curred to most of us how far the often expressed 



124 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

admiration of the classics is genuine. It is impos- 
sible not to see that there is a great deal of talk 
which is purely conventional. We know well 
enough that the ordinary reader does not take 
Chaucer or Spenser from the shelf from year's end 
to year's end. It is idle to deny that the latest 
novel has a thousand times better chance of being 
read than any classic, and since there is always a 
latest novel the classics are under a perpetual dis- 
advantage. How far, then, was my friend right? 
We live in an age when we dare to question any- 
thing ; when doubt examines everything. We claim 
to test things on their merits ; and if the reverence 
with which old authors have been regarded is a 
mere tradition and a fetish, it is as well that its 
falsity be known. 

Is it true that the majority of readers find the 
works of the great writers of the past dull and 
unattractive ? I must confess that it is true. It 
is one of those facts of which we seldom speak in 
polite society, as we seldom speak of the fact that 
so large a portion of mankind yield to the temp- 
tations of life. It is more of an affront, indeed, 
to intimate that a man is unfamiliar with Shake- 
speare than to accuse him of having foully done to 
death his grandmother. Whatever be the facts, 
we have tacitly agreed to assume that every intel- 
ligent man is of course acquainted with certain 
books. We all recognize that we live in a society 
in which familiarity with these works is put forward 
as an essential condition of intellectual, and indeed 
almost of social and moral, respectability. One 



THE CLASSICS 125 

would hesitate to ask to dinner a man who con- 
fessed to a complete ignorance of " The Canter- 
bury Tales ; " and if one's sister married a person 
so hardened as to own to being unacquainted with 
" Hamlet," one would take a good deal of pains to 
prevent the disgraceful fact from becoming public. 
We have come to accept a knowledge of the classics 
as a measure of cultivation ; and yet at the same 
time, by an absurd contradiction, we allow that 
knowledge to be assumed, and we accept for the 
real the sham while we are assured of its falsity. 
In other words, we tacitly agree that cultivation 
shall be tested by a certain criterion, and then 
allow men unrebuked to offer in its stead the flim- 
siest pretext. We piously pretend that we all read 
the masterpieces of literature while as a rule we 
do not ; and the plain fact is that few of us dare 
rebuke our neighbors lest we bring to light our own 
shortcomings. 

Such a state of things is sufficiently curious to 
be worth examination ; and there would also seem 
to be some advisability of amendment. If it is not 
to be supposed that we can alter public sentiment, 
we may at least free ourselves from the thralldom 
of superstition. If this admiration of the classics 
which men profess with their lips, yet so commonly 
deny by their acts, is a relic of old-time prejudice, 
if it be but a mouldy inheritance from days when 
learning was invested with a sort of supernatural 
dignity, it is surely time that it was cast aside. 
We should at least know whether in this matter it 
is rational to hold by common theory or by common 
practice. 



126 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

In the first place it is necessary to supply that 
definition of a classic which is so generally want- 
ing. In their heart of hearts, concealed like a 
secret crime, many persons hide an obstinate con- 
viction that a classic is any book which everybody 
should have read, yet which nobody wishes to read. 
The idea is not unallied to the notion that good- 
ness is whatever we do not wish to do ; and one is 
as sensible as the other. It has already been said 
that the object of the study of literature is to enjoy 
and to experience literature ; to live in it and to 
thrill with its emotions. It follows that the popu- 
lar idea just mentioned is neither more nor less 
sensible than the theory that it is better to have 
lived than to live, to have loved than to love. 
Whatever else may be said, it is manifest that this 
popular definition of a classic as a book not to 
read but to have read is an absurd contradiction of 
terms. 

Equally common is the error that a classic is a 
book which is merely old. One constantly hears 
the word applied to any work, copies of which have 
come down to us from a former generation, with 
a tendency to assume that merit is in direct pro- 
portion to antiquity. To disabuse the mind from 
this error nothing is needed but to examine intelli- 
gently the catalogue of any great library. Therein 
are to be found lists of numerous authors whose 
productions have accidentally escaped submergence 
in the stream of time, and are now preserved as 
simple and innocuous diet for book-worms insec- 
tivorous or human. These writings are not clas- 



THE CLASSICS 127 

sics, although there is a tribe of busy idlers who 
devote their best energies to keeping before the 
public works which have not sufficient vitality to 
live of themselves, — editors who perform, in a 
word, the functions of hospital nurses to literary 
senilities which should be left in decent quiet to 
die from simple inanition- Mere age no more 
makes a classic of a poor book than it makes a 
saint of a sinner. 

A classic is more than a book which has been 
preserved. It must have been approved. It is a 
work which has received the suffrages of genera- 
tions. Out of the innumerable books, of the mak- 
ing of which there was no end even so long ago 
as the days of Solomon, some few have been by 
the general voice of the world chosen as worthy of 
preservation, There are certain writings which, 
amid all the multitudinous distractions of practical 
life, amid all the changes of custom, belief, and 
taste, have continuously pleased and moved man- 
kind, — and to these we give the name Classics. 

A book has two sorts of interest ; that which 
is temporary, and that which is permanent. The 
former depends upon its relation to the time in 
which it is produced. In these days of magazines 
there is a good deal of talk about articles which 
are what is called timely. This means that they 
fall in with some popular interest of the moment. 
When a war breaks out in the Soudan, an account 
of recent explorations or travels in that region 
is timely, because it appeals to readers who just 
then are eager to increase their information con- 



128 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

cerning the scene of the disturbance. When there 
is general discussion of any ethical or emotional 
topic, the novel or the poem making that topic its 
theme finds instant response. Often a book of no 
literary merit whatever speeds forward to notoriety 
because it is attached, like a barnacle on the side 
of a ship, to some leading issue of the day. At a 
time when there is wide discussion of social reforms, 
for instance, a man might write a rubbishy ro- 
mance picturing an unhuman and impossible social- 
ism, and find the fiction spring into notoriety from 
its connection with the theme of popular talk and 
thought. Books which are really notable, too, may 
owe their immediate celebrity to connection with 
some vital topic of the day. Their hold upon later 
attention will depend upon their lasting merit. 

The permanent interest and value of a book are 
precisely those qualities which have been specified 
as making it literature. As time goes on all tem- 
porary importance fails. Nothing becomes more 
quickly obsolete than the thing which is merely 
timely. It may retain interest as a curious his- 
toric document. It will always have some value 
as showing what was read by large numbers at a 
given period; but nobody will cherish the merely 
timely book as literature, although in its prime 
it may have had the widest vogue, and may have 
conferred upon its author a delicious immortality 
lasting sometimes half his lifetime. Permanent in- 
terest gives a book permanent value, and this de- 
pends upon appeal to the permanent characteristics 
and emotions of humanity. 



THE CLASSICS 129 

While the temporary excitement over a book 
continues, no matter how evanescent the qualities 
upon which this excitement depends, the reader 
finds it difficult to realize that the work is not gen- 
uine and vital. It is not easy to distinguish the 
permanent from the momentary interest. With 
the passage of time extraneous attractions fade, 
and the work is left to depend upon its essential 
value. The classics are writings which, when all 
factitious interests that might have been lent to 
them by circumstances are stripped away, are found 
still to be of worth and importance. They are 
the wheat left in the threshing-floor of time, when 
has been blown away the chaff of sensational scrib- 
blings, noisily notorious productions, and tempo- 
rary works of what sort soever. It is of course not 
impossible that a work may have both kinds of 
merit ; and it is by no means safe to conclude that 
a book is not of enduring worth simply because it 
has appealed to instant interests and won immedi- 
ate popularity. " Don Quixote,-' on the one hand, 
and " Pilgrim's Progress," on the other, may serve 
as examples of works which were timely in the 
best sense, and which yet are permanent litera- 
ture. The important, point is that in the classics 
we have works which, whether they did or did 
not receive instant recognition, have by age been 
stripped of the accidental, and are found worthy 
in virtue of the essential that remains. They are 
books which have been proved by time, and have 
endured the test. 

The decision what is and what is not litera- 



130 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ture may be said to rest with the general voice of 
the intellectual world. Vague as the phrase may 
sound, it really represents the shaping power of the 
thought of the race. It is true that here as in all 
other matters of belief the general voice is likely 
to be a confirmation and a repetition of the voice 
of the few ; but whether at the outset indorsed by 
the few or not, a book cannot be said to be fairly 
entitled to the name " classic " until it has received 
this general sanction. Although this sanction, 
moreover, be as intangible as the wind in a sail, 
yet like the wind it is decisive and effective. 

The leaders of thought, moreover, have not only 
praised these books and had their judgment in- 
dorsed by the general voice, but they have by them 
formed their own minds. They are unanimous in 
their testimony to the value of the classics in the 
development of the perceptions, intellectual and 
emotional. So universally true is this that to re- 
peat it seems the reiteration of a truism. The fact 
of which we have already spoken, the fact that 
those who in theory profess to respect the classics, 
do yet in practice neglect them utterly, makes it 
necessary to examine the grounds upon which this 
truism rests. If the classics are the books which 
the general voice of the best intelligence of the 
race has declared to be permanently valuable, if 
the highest minds have universally claimed to 
have been nourished and developed by them, why 
is it that we so often neglect and practically ignore 
them? 

In the first place there are the obstacles of Ian- 



THE CLASSICS 131 

guage. There are the so to say technical difficul- 
ties of literary diction and form which have been 
somewhat considered in the preceding talks. There 
are the greater difficulties of dealing with concep- 
tions which belong to a different mental world. To 
a savage, the intellectual and emotional experiences 
of a civilized man would be incomprehensible, no 
matter in how clear speech they were expressed. 
To the unimaginative man the life of the world of 
imagination is pretty nearly as unintelligible as to 
the bushman of Australian wilds would be the sub- 
tly refined distinctions of that now extinct mon- 
ster, the London aesthete. The men who wrote the 
classics wrote earnestly and with profound convic- 
tion that which they profoundly felt ; it is needful 
to attain to their elevation in point of view before 
what they have written can be comprehended. 
This is a feat by no means easy for the ordinary 
reader. To one accustomed only to facile and 
commonplace thoughts and emotions it is by no 
means a light undertaking to rise to the level of the 
masters. Readers to whom the rhymes of the " poet's 
corner " in the newspapers, for instance, are thril- 
lingly sweet, are hardly to be expected to be equal 
to the emotional stress of Shelley's " Prometheus 
Unbound ; " it is not to be supposed that those who 
find "Over the Hills to the Poor-House " soul-satis- 
fying will respond readily to the poignant pathos 
of the parting of Hector and Andromache. The 
admirers of "Curfew must not ring to-night " and 
the jig-saw school of verse in general are men- 
tally incapable of taking the altitude of genuinely 



132 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

imaginative work. The greatest author can do but 
so much for his reader. He may suggest, but each 
mind must for itself be the creator. The classics 
are those works in which the geniuses of the world 
have most effectively suggested genuine and vital 
emotions ; but every reader must feel those emo- 
tions for himself. Not even the music of the 
spheres could touch the ear of a deaf man, and for 
the blind the beauty of Grecian Helen would be 
no more than ugliness. As Mrs. Browning puts 
it: — 

What angel but would seem 
To sensual eyes, ghost-dim ? 

The sluggish mind is incapable of comprehending, 
the torpid imagination incapable of realizing ; and 
the struggle to attain to comprehension and to 
feeling is too great an exertion for the mentally 
indolent. 

It is no less true, that to the mind unused to 
high emotions the vivid life of imaginative litera- 
ture is disconcerting. The ordinary reader is as 
abashed in the presence of these deep and vibrant 
feelings which he does not understand, and cannot 
share, as would be an English washerwoman to 
whom a duchess paid a ceremonious afternoon 
call. The feeling of inadequacy, of being con- 
fronted with an occasion to the requirements of 
which one is utterly unequal, is baffling and unpleas- 
ant to the last degree. In this difficulty of compre- 
hending, and in this inability to feel equal to the 
demands of the best literature, lies the most obvious 
explanation of the common neglect of the classics. 



THE CLASSICS 133 

It is also true that genuine literature demands 
for its proper appreciation a mood which is funda- 
mentally grave. Even beneath the humorous runs 
this vein of serious feeling. It is not possible 
to read Cervantes or Montaigne or Charles Lamb 
sympathetically without having behind laughter or 
smiles a certain inner solemnity. Hidden under 
the coarse and roaring fun of Rabelais lurk pro- 
found observations upon life, which no earnest man 
can think of lightly. The jests and "excellent 
fooling " of Shakespeare's clowns and drolls serve 
to emphasize the deep thought or sentiment which 
is the real import of the poet's work. Genuiue 
feeling must always be serious, because it takes 
hold upon the realities of human existence. 

It is not that one reading the classics must be 
sad. Indeed, there is nowhere else fun so keen, 
humor so exquisite, or sprightliness so enchanting. 
It is only that human existence is a solemn thing 
if viewed with a realization of its actualities and 
its possibilities ; and that the great aim of real 
literature is the presentation of life in its essen- 
tials. It is not possible to be vividly conscious 
of the mystery in the midst of which we live and 
not be touched with something of awe. From 
this solemnity the feeble soul shrinks as a silly 
child shrinks from the dark. The most profound 
feeling of which many persons are capable is the 
instinctive desire not to feel deeply. To such 
readers real literature means nothing, or it means 
too much. It fails to move them, or it wearies 
them by forcing them to feel. 



134 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Yet another reason for the neglect of the clas- 
sics is the irresistible attractiveness which belongs 
always to novelty, which makes a reader choose 
whatever is new rather than anything which has 
been robbed of this quality by time. Every mind 
which is at all responsive is sensitive to this fasci- 
nation of that which has just been written. What 
is new borrows importance from the infinite possi- 
bilities of the unknown. The secret of life, the 
great key to all the baffling mysteries of human 
existence, is still just beyond the bound of human 
endeavor, and there is always a tingling sense that 
whatever is fresh may have touched the longed-for 
solution to the riddle of existence. This zeal for 
the new makes the old to be left neglected ; and 
while we are eagerly welcoming novelties which in 
the end too often prove to be of little or no value, 
the classics, of tried and approved worth, stand in 
forlorn dust-gathering on the higher shelves of the 
library. 

A. Conan Doyle is reported as saying in a speech 
before a literary society : — 

It might be no bad thing for a man now and again 
to make a literary retreat, as pious men make a spir- 
itual one ; to forswear absolutely for a month in the 
year all ephemeral literature, and to bring an untar- 
nished mind to the reading of the classics. — London 
Academy, December 5, 1896. 

The suggestion is so good that if it does not seem 
practical, it is so much the worse for the age. 



THE VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 

It is sufficiently evident that the natural incli- 
nations of the ordinary man are not toward imagi- 
native literature, and that unless there were strong 
and tangible reasons why it is worth while to cul- 
tivate an appreciation and a fondness for them, 
the classics would be so little read that they might 
as well be sent to the junk-shop at once, save for 
the occasional mortal whom the gods from his 
birth have endowed with the precious gift of under- 
standing high speech. These reasons, moreover, 
must apply especially to the classics as distin- 
guished from books in general. Briefly stated, 
some of them are as follows : — 

The need of a knowledge of the classics for the 
understanding of literary language has already 
been spoken of at some length. This is, of course, 
a minor and comparatively extraneous considera- 
tion, but it is one not to be left wholly out. It is 
not difficult, however, to get a superficial famili- 
arity with famous writings by means of literary 
dictionaries and extract books; and with this a 
good many persons are apparently abundantly con- 
tent. The process bears the same relation to the 
actual study of the originals that looking at for- 



136 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

eign photographic views does to traveling abroad. 
It is undoubtedly better than nothing, although it 
is by no means the real thing. It gives one an 
intellectual understanding of classic and literary 
allusions, but not an emotional one. Fully to appre- 
ciate and enjoy the allusions with which literature 
is filled, it is essential to have gained knowledge 
directly from the originals. 

One reason why references to the classics are so 
frequent in literary language, is that in these writ- 
ings are found thought and emotional expression 
in their youth, so to say. Even more important 
than learning the force of these allusions is the 
coming in contact with this fresh inspiration and 
utterance. That into which a man steps full 
grown can never be to him the same as that in 
which he has grown up. We cannot have with the 
thing which we have known only in its complete 
form the same intimate connection as with that 
which we have watched from its very beginnings. 
To that with which we have grown we are united 
by a thousand delicate and intangible fibres, fine 
as cobweb and strong as steel. The student who 
attempts to form himself solely upon the literature 
of to-day misses entirely the childhood, the youth, 
the growth of literary art. He comes full grown, 
and generally sophisticated, to that which is itself 
full grown and sophisticated. It is not possible 
for him to become himself a child, but he may go 
back toward the childhood of emotional expression 
and as it were advance step by step with the race. 
He may feel each fresh emotional discovery as if it 



THE VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 137 

were as new to him as it was in truth new for the 
author who centuries ago expressed it so well that 
the record has become immortal. 

I do not know whether what I mean is fully- 
clear, and it is of course difficult to give examples 
where the matter is so subtle. It is certain, how- 
ever, that any reader of early literature must be 
conscious how in the simplicity and naivete of the 
best old authors we find things which are now 
hackneyed and all but commonplace said with a 
freshness and conviction which makes them for the 
first time real to us. Many emotions have been so 
long recognized and expressed in literature that 
there seems hardly to be a conceivable phase in 
which they have not been shown, and hardly a 
conceivable phrase in which they have not been 
embodied. It appears impossible to express them 
now with the freshness and sincerity which be- 
longed to them when they were first imprisoned 
in words. So true is this that were it not that 
the personal impress of genius and the experience 
of the imaginative writer always give vitality, lit- 
erature would cease from the face of the earth, and 
become a lost art. 

It is the persuasion and vividness of first dis- 
covery which impart to the folk-song its charm 
and force. The early ballads often put to shame 
the poetry of later days. The unsophisticated 
singers of these lays had never been told that it 
was proper for them to have any especial emotions ; 
they had never heard talk about this feeling or 
that, and art did not consciously exist for them as 



138 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

other than the spontaneous and sincere expression 
of what really moved them. That which they felt 
too strongly to repress, they said without any self- 
consciousness. Their artistic forms were so simple 
as to impose no hindrance to the instinctive desire 
for revealing to others what swelled in their very 
hearts. The result is that impressiveness and that 
convincingness which can come from nothing but 
perfect sincerity. Innumerable poets have put 
into verse the sentiments of the familiar folk-song, 
" Waly, waly ; " yet it is not easy to find in all the 
list the same thing said with a certain childlike 
directness which goes to the heart that one finds 
in passages like this : — 

O waly, waly, but love be bonny 

A little time while it is new ; 
But when : t is auld, it waxeth cauld, 

And fades awa' like morning dew ! 

What later singer is there who has surpassed in 
pathos that makes the heart ache the exquisite 
beauty of " Fair Helen " ? 

I would I were where Helen lies ; 
Night and day on me she cries ; 
Oh, that I were where Helen lies 
On fair Kireonnell Lea ! . . . 

I would I were where Helen lies ; 
Night and day on me she cries ; 
And I am weary of the skies, 
Since my love died for me. 

The directness and simplicity which are the 
charm of folk-song and ballad are far more likely 
to be found in early literature than in that which 
is produced under conditions which foster self- 
consciousness. They belong, it is true, to the work 



THE VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 139 

of all really great writers. No man can produce 
genuinely great art without being completely pos- 
sessed by the emotions which he expresses ; so that 
for the time being he is not wholly removed from 
the mood of the primitive singers. Singleness of 
purpose and simplicity of expression, however, are 
the birthright of those writers who have been pio- 
neers in literature. It is chiefly in their work that 
we may hope to experience the delight of finding 
emotions in the freshness of their first youth, of 
gaining something of that realization of perception 
which is fully only his who first of mortal men dis- 
covers and proclaims some new possibility of human 
existence. 

Another quality of much importance in primi- 
tive writings and the early classics is complete 
freedom from sentimentality. As certain para- 
sites do not attack young trees, so sentimentality 
is a fungus which never appears upon a literature 
until it is well grown. It is not until a people is 
sufficiently cultivated to appreciate the expression 
of emotions in art that it is capable of imitating 
them or of simulating that which it has learned to 
regard as a desirable or noble feeling. As culti- 
vation advances, there is sure to be at length a 
time when those who have more vanity than senti- 
ment begin to affect that which it has come to be 
considered a mark of high cultivation to feel. We 
all know this vice of affectation too well, and I 
mention it only to remark that from this literature 
in its early stages is far more apt to be free than 
it is in its later and more consciously developed 
phases. 



140 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

The blight which follows sentimentality is mor- 
bidity ; and one of the most important character- 
istics of the genuine classics is their wholesome 
sanity. By sanity I mean freedom from the mor- 
bid and the diseased ; and the quality is one 
especially to be prized in these days of morbid ten- 
dencies and diseased eccentricities. There is much 
in many of the classics which is sufficiently coarse 
when measured by later and more refined stand- 
ards ; but even this is free from the gangrene 
which has developed in over-ripe civilizations. 
Rabelais chose the dung-hill as his pulpit ; in 
Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and in the 
Bible there are many things which no clean-minded 
man would now think of saying; but there is in 
none of these any of that insane pruriency which 
is the chief claim to distinction of several notorious 
contemporary authors. Neither is there in classic 
writers the puling, sentimental, sickly way of look- 
ing at life as something all awry. The reader who 
sits down to the Greek poets, to Dante, to Chaucer, 
to Moliere, to Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Mon- 
taigne, to Milton, knows at least that he is enter- 
ing an atmosphere wholesome, bracing, and manly, 
free alike from sentimentality and from all morbid 
and insane taint. 

Besides a knowledge of literary language, we 
must from the classics gain our standards of liter- 
ary judgment. This follows from what has been 
said of temporary and permanent interest in books. 
Only in the classics do we find literature reduced 
to its essentials. The accidental associations which 



THE VALUE OF THE CLASSICS 141 

cluster about any contemporary work, the fleeting 
value which this or that may have from accidental 
conditions, the obscurity into which prejudice of 
a particular time may throw real merit, all help 
to make it impossible to learn from contemporary 
work what is really and essentially bad or good. It 
is from works which may be looked at dispassion- 
ately, writings from which the accidental has been 
stripped by time, that we must inform ourselves 
what shall be the standard of merit. It is only 
from the classics that we may learn to discriminate 
the essential from the incidental, the permanent 
from the temporary ; and thus gain a criterion by 
which to try the innumerable books poured upon 
us by the inexhaustible press of to-day. 

Nor do we gain only standards of literature from 
the classics, but standards of life as well. In a 
certain sense standards of literature and of life 
may be said to be one, since our estimate of the 
truth and the value of a work of art and our judg- 
ment of the meaning and value of existence can 
hardly be separated. The highest object for which 
we study any literature being to develop character 
and to gain a knowledge of the conditions of being, 
it follows that it is for these reasons in especial 
that we turn to the classics. These works are the 
verdicts upon life which have been most generally 
approved by the wisest men who have lived ; and 
they have been tested not by the experiences of 
one generation only, but by those of succeeding 
centuries. For wise, wholesome, and comprehen- 
sive living there is no better aid than a familiar, 
intimate, sympathetic knowledge of the classics. 



XI 

THE GREATER CLASSICS 

There are, then, clear and grave reasons why 
the classics are worthy of the most intelligent and 
careful attention. The evidence supports culti- 
vated theory rather than popular practice. We 
are surely right in the most exacting estimate of 
the place that they should hold in our lives ; and 
in so far as we neglect them, in so far we are justly 
condemned by the general if vague opinion of soci- 
ety at large. They are the works to which apply 
with especial force whatever reasons there are 
which give value to literature ; they are the means 
most efficient and most readily at hand for the 
enriching and the ennobling of life. 

It is impossible here to specify to any great ex- 
tent what individual books among the classics are 
of most importance. This has been done over and 
over, and it is within the scope of these talks to do 
little more than to consider the general relation to 
life of the study of literature. Some, however, are 
of so much prominence that it is impossible to pass 
them in silence. There are certain works which 
inevitably come to the mind as soon as one speaks 
of the classics at all ; and of these perhaps the most 
prominent are the Bible, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 143 

and Shakespeare. The Greek tragedians, Boccaccio, 
Moliere, Cervantes, Montaigne, Spenser, Milton, 
Ariosto, Petrarch, Tasso, and the glorious company 
of other writers, such as the Elizabethan drama- 
tists and the few really great Latin authors, it 
seems almost inexcusable not to discuss individ- 
ually, yet they must be passed over here. The 
simple lists of these men and their works give to 
the mind of the genuine book-lover a glow as if 
he had drunk of generous wine. No man eager to 
get the most from life will pass them by ; but in 
these talks there is not space to consider them par- 
ticularly. 

Although it is only with its literary values that 
we have at present any concern, it is somewhat 
difficult to speak of the Bible from a merely liter- 
ary point of view. Those who regard the Bible as 
an inspired oracle are apt to forget that it has too 
a literary worth, distinct from its religious function, 
and they are inclined to feel somewhat shocked at 
any discussion which even for the moment leaves 
its ethical character out of account. On the other 
hand, those who look upon the Scriptures as the 
instrument of a theology of which they do not ap- 
prove are apt in their hostility to be blind to the 
literary importance and excellence of the work. 
There is, too, a third class, perhaps to-day, and 
especially among the rising generation, the most 
numerous of all, who simply neglect the Bible as 
dull and unattractive, and made doubly so by the 
iteration of appeals that it be read as a religious 
guide, Undoubtedly this feeling has been fostered 



144 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

by the injudicious zeal of many of the friends of 
the book, who have forced the Scriptures forward 
until they have awakened that impulse of resist- 
ance which is the instinctive self-preservation of 
individuality. In all these classes for different 
reasons praise of the Bible is likely to awaken a 
feeling of opposition ; yet the fact remains that 
from a purely literary point of view the Bible is 
the most important prose work in the language. 

The rational attitude of the student toward the 
Scriptures is that which separates entirely the reli- 
gious from the literary consideration. I wish to 
speak on the same footing to those who do and 
those who do not regard the Bible as a sacred 
book, with those who do and those who do not 
receive its religious teachings. Let for the mo- 
ment these points be waived entirely, and there 
remains the splendid literary worth of this great 
classic ; there remains the fact that it has shaped 
faith and fortune for the whole of Europe and 
America for centuries ; and especially that the 
English version has been the most powerful of all 
intellectual and imaginative forces in moulding the 
thought and the literature of all English-speaking 
peoples. One may regard the theological effects of 
the Scriptures as altogether admirable, or one may 
feel that some of them have been narrowing and 
unfortunate ; one may reject or accept the book as 
a religious authority ; but at least one must recog- 
nize that it is not possible to enter upon the intel- 
lectual and emotional heritage of the race without 
being acquainted with the King James Bible. 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 145 

" Intense study of the Bible," Coleridge has 
said most justly, " will keep any writer from being 
vulgar in point of style." He might almost have 
added that appreciative study of this book will pro- 
tect any reader from vulgarity in literature and 
life alike. The early sacred writings of any people 
have in them the dignity of sincere conviction 
and imaginative emotion. The races to which 
these books have been divine have revered them 
as the word of the Deity, but it is the supreme emo- 
tion which thrills through them that has touched 
their readers and made possible and real the claim 
of inspiration. Every responsive reader must 
vibrate with the human feeling of which they are 
full. We are little likely to have anything but 
curiosity concerning the dogmas of the ancient 
Hindoo or Persian religion, yet it is impossible to 
read the ecstatic hymns of the Yedas or the exalted 
pages of the Zend-Avesta without being profoundly 
moved by the humanity which cries out in them. 
Of the Bible this is especially true for us, because 
the book is so closely connected with the life and 
development of our branch of the human family. 

If it were asked which of the classics a man 
absolutely must know to attain to a knowledge of 
literature even respectable, the answer undoubtedly 
would be : " The Bible and Shakespeare." He 
must be familiar — familiar in the sense in which 
we use that word in the phrase, " mine own familiar 
friend, in whom I trusted" — with the greatest 
plays of Shakespeare, and with the finer portions 
of the Scriptures. I do not of course mean all of 



146 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the Bible. Nobody, no matter how devout, can be 
expected to find imaginative stimulus in strings of 
genealogies such as that which begins the Book of 
Chronicles, or in the minute details of the Jewish 
ceremonial law. I mean the simple directness of 
Genesis and Exodus ; the straightforward sincer- 
ity of Judges and Joshua ; the sweetness and beauty 
of Ruth and Esther ; the passionately idealized 
sensuousness of Canticles ; the shrewdly pathetic 
wisdom of Ecclesiastes ; the splendidly imaginative 
ecstasies of Isaiah ; the uplift of the Psalms ; the ten- 
der virility of the Gospels ; the spiritual dithyram- 
bics of the Apocalypse. No reader less dull than 
a clod can remain unreverent and unthrilled in the 
presence of that magnificent poem which one hesi- 
tates to say is surpassed by either Homer or Dante, 
the Book of Job. The student of literature may 
be of any religion or of no religion, but he must 
realize, and realize by intimate acquaintance, that, 
taken as a whole, the Bible is the most virile, the 
most idiomatic, the most imaginative prose work in 
the language. 

The appearance of literary editions of portions 
of the Bible for general reading is an encouraging 
sign that there is to-day a reaction from the neg- 
lect into which the book has fallen. Unfortu- 
nately, these editions follow for the most part the 
text of the Revised Version, which may be excellent 
from a theological point of view, but which from 
a literary one stands in much the same relation 
to the King James version as the paraphrases 
of Dry den stand to the original text of Chaucer. 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 147 

The literary student is concerned with the book 
which has been in the hands and hearts of writers 
and thinkers of preceding generations ; with the 
words which have tinctured the prose masterpieces 
and given color to the poetry of our tongue. To 
attempt to alter the text now is for the genuine 
literary student not unlike modernizing Shake- 
speare. 

The Bible is a library in itself, so great is its 
variety; and it is practically indispensable as a 
companion in literary study. To neglect it is one 
of the most grave errors possible to the student. 
It has, it is true, its serious and obvious defects, 
and from a literary point of view the New Testa- 
ment is infinitely less interesting than the Old ; 
but taken all in all, it is a great and an enchanting 
book, permanent in its worth and permanent in its 
interest. 

To go on to talk of Homer is at once to bring 
up the much-vexed question of reading translations. 
It seems to me rather idle in these days to take 
time to discuss this. Whatever decision be arrived 
at, the fact remains that the general reader will 
not read the classics in the original. However 
great the loss, he must take them in the English 
version, or let them alone. Even the most accom- 
plished graduates of the best colleges are not al- 
ways capable of appreciating in Greek the literary 
flavor of the works which they can translate pretty 
accurately. There is no longer time in these busy 
and over-crowded days for the student so to satu- 
rate himself with a dead language that it shall be 



148 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

as familiar to him as his own tongue. The multi- 
plicity of present impressions renders it all but im- 
possible to get completely into the atmosphere of 
a civilization bygone. A few of the men trained 
in foreign schools in the most scholarly fashion 
have probably arrived at the power of feeling sen- 
sitively the literary quality of the classics in the 
original ; but for the ordinary student, this is en- 
tirely out of the question. It is sad, but it is an 
inevitable human limitation. Emerson, as is well 
known, boldly commended the practice of reading 
translations. His sterling sense probably desired 
the consistency of having theory agree with prac- 
tice where there is not the slightest hope of mak- 
ing practice agree with theory. Whether we like 
it or do not like it, the truth is that most persons 
will take the Greek and Latin authors in transla- 
tion or not at all. 

And certainly they must be read in some tongue. 
No genuine student of literature will neglect Homer 
or the Greek tragedians. The old Greeks were by 
no means always estimable creatures. They not 
infrequently did those things which they ought not 
to have done, and left undone those things which 
they ought to have done ; but the prayer-book did 
not then exist, so that in spite of all there was 
plenty of health in them. They were not models 
in morals, while they were entirely unacquainted 
with many modern refinements ; but they were 
eminently human. They were sane and wholesome 
beings, manly and womanly ; so that a reader is 
in far better company with the heroes of Homer in 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 149 

their vices than he is with the morbid creations of 
much modern fiction in their moments of the most 
conscious and painfully elaborated virtue. Herein, 
it seems to me, lies the greatest value of Greek 
literature. Before he can be anything else thor- 
oughly and soundly, a man must be healthily hu- 
man. Hot -house virtue is on the whole about 
as dangerous a disease as open-air vice ; and it 
is far more difficult to cure. Unless a man or a 
woman be genuine, he or she is nothing, and the 
mere appearance of good or evil is not of profound 
consequence. To be sane and human, to think 
genuine thoughts, and to do genuine deeds, is the 
beginning of all real virtue ; and nothing is more 
conducive to the development of genuineness than 
the company of those who are sound and real. If 
we are with whole-souled folk, we cannot pose, 
even to ourselves ; and it seems to me that the 
reader who, with full and buoyant imagination, 
puts himself into the company of the Greeks of 
Homer or iEschylus or Euripides or Sophocles 
cannot be content, for the time being at least, to be 
anything but a simply genuine human creature 
himself. 

Of course I do not mean that the reader reasons 
this out. Consciously to think that we will be 
genuine is dangerously near a pose in itself. It is 
that he finds himself in a company so thoroughly 
manly, so real and virile, that he instinctively will 
take long breaths, and without thinking of it lay 
aside the conventional pose which self is so apt to 
impose upon self. We do not, while reading, lose 



150 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

in the least the power of judging between right 
and wrong. We realize that Ulysses, delightful 
old rascal though he is, is an unconscionable trick- 
ster. We are no more likely to play fast and loose 
with domestic ties because the Grecian heroes, and 
even the Greek gods, left their morals at home for 
their wives to keep bright while they went abroad 
to take their pleasure. Manners and standards in 
those days were not altogether the same that they 
are now ; but right is right in Homer, and wrong 
is wrong, as it is in the work of every really great 
poet since the world began. The whole of Greek 
poetry, like Greek sculpture, has an enchanting 
and wholesome open-air quality ; and even when it 
is nude it is not naked. We miss much of the 
beauty by losing the wonderful form, and no trans- 
lation ever approached the original, but we get 
always the mood of sanity and reality. 

The mood of Dante seems sometimes more diffi- 
cult for the modern reader than that of the Greeks. 
The high spiritual severity, the passionate auster- 
ity of the Florentine, are certainly far removed 
from the busy, practical temper of to-day. Far 
away as they are in time, the Greeks were after all 
men of tangible deeds, of practical affairs; they 
knew the taste of ginger hot i' the mouth, and took 
hold upon life with a zest thoroughly to be ap- 
preciated in this materialistic age. Dante, on the 
other hand, has the burning solemnity of the pro- 
phets of the Old Testament, so that the point of 
view of the " Divine Comedy " is not far removed 
from that of Isaiah. Of all the greatest classics the 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 151 

" Divine Comedy " is probably the least read to- 
day, at any rate in this country. The translations 
of it are for the most part hopelessly unsatisfac- 
tory, the impossibility of setting poetry over from 
the honeyed Italian into a language of a genius so 
different as the English being painfully obvious 
even to those little critical. There is a great deal 
that is obscure, and yet more which cannot be un- 
derstood without a good deal of special historical 
information ; so that it is impossible to read Dante 
for the first time without that frequent reference 
to the notes which is so unfortunate and undesira- 
ble in a first reading. It is practically necessary 
to go over the notes with care once or twice before 
attempting the poem. Get the information first, 
and then plunge into the poetry. It is a plunge 
into a sea whereof the brine is bitter, the waters 
piercingly cold, and where not infrequently the 
waves roll high ; but it is a plunge invigorating 
and life-giving. The man who has once read Dante 
with sympathy and delight can never again be 
wholly common and unclean, no matter into what 
woful faults and follies he may thereafter fall. 

To come nearer home, readers are somewhat 
foolishly apt to feel that it is about as difficult to 
read Chaucer as it is to read Homer or Dante. 
As a matter of fact any intelligent and educated 
person should be able to master the theories of the 
pronunciation of Chaucerian English in a couple 
of mornings, and to read him with ease and pleas- 
ure in a week or two at most. It is a pity that 
there is not a good complete edition of Chaucer 



152 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

pointed and accented, so that the reader might not 
be troubled with any consciousness of effort ; but 
after all, the difficulty lies more in the idea than in 
the fact. When one has mastered the language of 
the thirteenth century, in company how enchanting 
does he find himself ! The sweetness, the whole- 
someness, the kindliness, the sincerity, the humor, 
and the humanity of Chaucer can hardly be over- 
praised. 

Of Shakespeare, — "our myriad-minded Shake- 
speare," — it seems almost needless to speak. Con- 
cerning his poetry one may be silent because the 
theme is so wide, and because writers so many and 
so able have already discoursed upon the subject 
so eloquently. To attempt to-day to explain why 
men should read Shakespeare is like entering into 
an argument to prove that men should delight in 
the sunshine or to explain that the sea is beautiful 
and wonderful. If readers to-day neglect this su- 
preme classic it is not from ignorance of its impor- 
tance. It may be from a want of realization of the 
pleasure and inspiration which the poet affords. 
Those who have not tested it may doubt as one 
heart-whole doubts the joys of love, and in either 
case only experience can make wise. 

Dryden's words may suffice here and stand for 
all the quotations which might be made : — 

. To begin with Shakespeare. He was the man who of 
all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest 
and most comprehensive soul. All the images of na- 
ture were still present to him, and he drew them not 
laboriously, hut luckily : when he describes anything you 
more than see it, you feel it. 



THE GREATER CLASSICS 153 

The man who does not read and delight in this 
poet is scarcely to be considered intellectually alive 
at all, as far as there is any connection between the 
mind and literature ; and the highest intellectual 
crime of which an English-speaking man is capable 
is to leave his Shakespeare to gather dust upon his 
shelves unread. 

In all this I do not wish to be understood as 
holding that we are always to read the classics, or 
that we are to read nothing else. To live up to the 
requirements of the society of Apollo continuously 
would be too fatiguing even for the Muses. We 
cannot be always in a state of exaltation ; but we 
cannot in any high sense live at all without becom- 
ing familiar with what exalted living is. The study 
of the classics calls for conscious and often for 
strong endeavor. We do not put ourselves thor- 
oughly into the mood of other times and of remote 
conditions without effort. Indeed, it requires effort 
to lift our less buoyant imaginations to the level of 
any great work. The sympathetic reading of any 
supremely imaginative author is like climbing a 
mountain, — it is not to be accomplished without 
strain, but it rewards one with the breath of an 
upper air and a breadth of view impossible in the 
valley. For him who prefers the outlook of the 
earth-worm to that of the eagle the classics have 
no message and no meaning. For him who is not 
content with any view save the widest, these are 
the mountain peaks which lift to the highest and 
noblest sight. 



XII 

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 

We speak of the classics, of ancient literature, 
and of contemporary literature, but in reality all 
literature is one. We divide it into sections for 
convenience of study, but it is a notable error to 
forget that it is consecutive from the dawn of civili- 
zation to the present. It is true that in applying 
the term to works of our own time it is both cus- 
tomary and necessary to employ the word with a 
meaning wider than that which it has elsewhere. 
It is often difficult to distinguish in contemporary 
productions that which is of genuine and lasting 
merit from that which is simply meretricious and 
momentary, and still harder to force others to rec- 
ognize such distinction when made. It is there- 
fore inevitable that the name literature should 
have a broader signification than when applied to 
work which has been tested and approved by time. 

There are few things more perplexing than the 
attempt to choose from the all but innumerable 
books of our own day those which are to be con- 
sidered as genuine. If we are able to keep vividly 
in mind what qualities make a thing literature, it 
is possible to have some not inadequate idea of what 
contemporary writings most completely fulfill the 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 155 

given conditions. We are able to speak with as- 
surance of the work of a Tennyson or a Browning ; 
and to feel that we have witnessed the birth of 
classics of the future. Beside these, however, stand 
the enormous multitude of books which are widely- 
read, much talked about, and voluminously adver- 
tised ; books which we cannot openly dispraise 
without the risk of being sneered at as captious 
or condemned as conceited. There are the poems 
which publishers inform the public in column-long 
advertisements, bristling with the testimonials of 
men and women who make writing their business, 
are the finest productions since Shakespeare ; there 
are the novels which prove themselves to be works 
of genius by selling by the hundreds of thousands 
of copies and very likely being given to the pur- 
chasers of six bars of some patent soap ; there are 
the thin and persecuted looking volumes of " prose 
poems " or rhyming prose which are looked upon 
by small bands of devoted followers as the morsel 
of leaven which is to leaven the whole lump ; there 
are, in short, all those perplexing writings which 
have merit of some kind and in some degree, yet 
to decide the genuine and lasting merit of which 
might tax the wisdom and the patience of a Solo- 
mon of Solomons. 

I have already spoken of the effect which tem- 
porary qualities are sure to have in determining 
the success of an author. The history of books is 
full of instances of works which have in their brief 
day filled the reading world with noisy admiration, 
but which have in the end been found destitute of 



156 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

enduring merit. While transient fame is at its 
height, while enthusiastically injudicious admirers 
are praising and judiciously enthusiastic publish- 
ers are reechoing their plaudits, it is a well-trained 
mind that is able to form a sound and rational 
judgment, and to distinguish between the ephem- 
eral and the abiding. The only hope lies in a 
careful and discriminating application of standards 
deduced from the classics. He who desires to 
judge the books of to-day must depend upon com- 
parison with the books of yesterday. He must be 
able to feel toward the literature of the past as if 
it were of the present, and toward that of the pres- 
ent as if it were of the past. 

It is not to the popular verdict upon a work that 
one can look for aid in deciding upon real merit. 
In time the general public accepts the verdict of 
the few, but at first it is the noisy opinion of the 
many, voluble and undiscriminating, which is heard. 
The general public is always affected more by the 
accidental than by the permanent qualities of a 
work, and it is more often imposed upon by shams 
than touched by real feeling. It is easy to recog- 
nize conventional signs for sentiment, and it is not 
difficult for the ordinary reader to persuade him- 
self that he experiences emotions which are expli- 
citly set forth for him. Popular taste and popular 
power of appreciation are not inaccurately repre- 
sented by those eminently successful journals which 
in one column give the fashions and receipts for 
cake and in the next detailed directions for experi- 
encing all the sensations of culture. Sentimental- 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 157 

ity is always more instantly and more widely effec- 
tive than sentiment. Sentimentality finds a ready 
response from the fact that it only calls upon us 
to seem, while sentiment demands that for the time 
being at least we shall be. 

It is necessary here to say that I do not wish to 
be misunderstood. I do not mean in the least to 
speak with scorn or contempt of the lack of power 
justly to discriminate and to appreciate which comes 
from either natural disability or lack of opportuni- 
ties of cultivation. Narrowness of comprehension 
and appreciation is a misfortune, but it is not ne- 
cessarily a fault. I mean only to point out that it 
is a thing to be outgrown if possible. Of the pa- 
thos of lives which are denied their desire in this 
I am too keenly aware to speak of such otherwise 
than tenderly. For the young women who put 
their sentiments up in curl-papers and the young 
men who wax the mustaches of their minds I 
have no patience whatever ; but for those who are 
seeking that which seems to them the best, even 
though they blunder and mistakenly fall prostrate 
before Dagon, the great god of the Philistines, it 
is impossible not to feel sympathy and even admir- 
ation. In what I have been saying of the falli- 
bility of popular opinion I have not meant to cast 
scorn on any sincerity, no matter where it is to be 
found; but merely to point out that the general 
voice of the public, even when sincere, is greatly to 
be distrusted. 

Whatever contemporary literature may be, how- 
ever mistaken may be the popular verdict, and 



158 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

however difficult it may be for the most careful 
criticism to determine what is of lasting and what 
of merely ephemeral merit, the fact remains that it 
is the voice of our own time, and as such cannot 
be disregarded. To devote attention exclusively 
to the classics is to get out of sympathy with the 
thought of our own generation. It is idle to ex- 
pend energy in learning how to live if one does 
not go on to live. The true use of literature is not 
to make dreamers ; it is not to make the hold upon 
actual existence less firm. In the classics one learns 
what life is, but one lives in his own time. It fol- 
lows that no man can make his intellectual life full 
and round who does not keep intelligently in touch 
with what is thought and what is written by the 
men who are alive and working under the same 
conditions. 

Contemporary literature is the expression of the 
convictions of the time in which it is written. The 
race having advanced so far, this is the conclusion 
to which thinkers have come in regard to the mean- 
ing of life. Contemporary literature is like news 
from the front in war-time. It is sometimes cheer- 
ing, sometimes depressing, often enough inaccurate, 
but continually exciting. It is the word which 
comes to us of the progress of the eternal combat 
against the unknown forces of darkness which com- 
pass humanity around. There are many men who 
make a good deal of parade of never reading books 
of their own time. They are sometimes men of no 
inconsiderable powers of intellect and of much cul- 
tivation ; but it is hardly possible to regard them 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 159 

as of greater contemporary interest than are the 
mummies of the Pharaohs. They may be excellent 
in their day and generation, but they have deliber- 
ately chosen that their generation shall be one that 
is gone and their day a day that is ended. They 
may be interesting relics, but relics they are. It 
is often wise to wait a time for the subsiding of the 
frenzy of applause which greets a book that is clever 
or merely startling. It is not the lover of literature 
who reads all the new books because they are new, 
any more than it is he who neglects the old because 
they are old ; but if we are alive and in sympathy 
with our kind, we cannot but be eager to know 
what the intellectual world is thinking, what are 
the fresh theories of life, born of added experience, 
what are the emotions of our own generation. We 
cannot, in a word, be in tune with our time without 
being interested in contemporary literature. 

It is here that the intellectual character of a 
man is most severely tested. Here he is tried as 
by fire, and if there be in him anything of sham 
or any flaw in his cultivation it is inevitably 
manifest. It is easy to know what to read in the 
classics ; they are all explicitly labeled by the crit- 
ics of succeeding generations. When it comes to 
contemporary work a reader is forced largely to 
depend upon himself. Here he must judge by his 
individual standards ; and here he both must and 
will follow his own inclinations. It is not always 
possible for a man accurately to appraise his men- 
tal advancement by the classics he reads, because 
his choice may there be influenced by conventional 



160 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

rather than by personal valuation ; but if he will 
compare with the established classics the books 
which he genuinely likes and admires among the 
writings of his own time, he may come at an esti- 
mate of his mental state as fair as a man is ever 
likely to form of himself. 

It is, then, easy to see that there is a good deal 
of danger in dealing with current work. It is 
necessary to be in sympathy with the thought of 
the day, but it is only too common to pay too 
dear for this. It is extremely hard, for instance, 
to distinguish between genuine literary taste and 
curiosity when writings are concerned which have 
the fresh and lively interest which attaches to those 
things about which our fellows are actually talking 
and thinking. It is of course allowable to gratify 
a healthy curiosity, but it is well to recognize that 
such reading is hardly likely to promote mental 
growth. There is no law, civil or moral, against 
indulging the desire to know what is in any one of 
those books which are written to be talked about 
at ladies' luncheons ; and it is not impossible that 
the readers who give their time to this unwhole- 
some stuff would be doing something worse if they 
were not reading it. The only point upon which 
I wish to insist is that such amusement is neither 
literary nor intellectual. 

There is, moreover, the danger of allowing the 
mind to become fixed upon the accidental instead 
of the permanent. I have spoken of the fact that 
the temporary interest of a book may be so great 
as to blind the reader to all else. When " Uncle 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 161 

Tom's Cabin " was new, it was practically impos- 
sible for the readers of that day to see in it any- 
thing but a fiery tract against slavery. To-day 
who reads " Ground Arms " without being chiefly 
impressed with its arguments against war ? It is 
as controversial documents that these books were 
written. If they have truth to life, if they ade- 
quately express human emotion, they will be of 
permanent value after this temporary interest has 
passed. The danger is that the passing interest, 
which is natural and proper in itself, shall blind us 
to false sentiment, to unjust views of life, to sham 
emotion. We are constantly led to forget the im- 
portant principle that books of our own time must 
be judged by the standards which are afforded by 
the books which are of all time. 

There has never been a time when self-possession 
and sound judgment in dealing with contemporary 
literature were more important than they are to- 
day. The immeasurably prolific press of the nine- 
teenth century is like a fish-breeding establishment 
where minnows are born by the million a minute. 
There are so many books that the mind becomes 
bewildered. The student who might have the 
strength of mind to form an intelligent opinion of 
five books is utterly incapable of doing the same 
by five thousand. We are all constantly led on 
to read too many things. It has been again and 
again remarked that our grandfathers were better 
educated than their grandsons because they knew 
thoroughly the few works which came in their way. 
We have become the victims of over-reading until 



162 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the modern mind seems in danger of being destroyed 
by literary gluttony. 

It is well in dealing with contemporary work to 
be especially self -exacting in insisting that a book is 
not to be read once which is not to be read a second 
time. This may seem to be a rule made merely for 
the sake of having a proper theory, yet it is to be 
taken literally and observed exactly. It is true that 
the temptation is so great to read books which are 
talked about, that we are all likely to run through 
a good many things which we know to be really un- 
worthy of a single perusal, and of course to go over 
them again would be a waste of more time. Where 
to draw the line between the permanent and the 
ephemeral is a point which each must settle for 
himself. If, on the whole, it seem to a man well 
to pay the price in time and in the risk of forming 
bad mental habits, it is his right to do this, but pay 
the price he must and will. 

It is hardly possible to discuss contemporary lit- 
erature without speaking of that which is not liter- 
ature, — the periodicals. One of the conditions of 
the present time which most strongly affects the 
relations of ordinary readers to reading in general 
is the part which periodicals of one sort or another 
play in modern life. The newspaper enters so inti- 
mately into existence to-day that no man can escape 
it if he would, and with innumerable readers it is 
practically the sole mental food. It is hardly neces- 
sary to say that there is no more relation between 
the newspaper and literature than there would be 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 163 

between two persons because they both wear hats. 
Both books and journals are expressed in printed 
words, and that is about all that there is in com- 
mon. It is necessary to use the daily paper, but its 
office is chiefly a mechanical one. It is connected 
with the purely material side of life. This is not a 
fault, any more than it is the fault of a spade that 
it is employed to dig the earth instead of being used 
to serve food with. It is not the function of the 
newspapers to minister to the intellect or the imagi- 
nation in any high sense. They fulfill their mis- 
sion when they are clean and reliable in material 
affairs. What is beyond this is a pretense at lit- 
erature under impossible conditions, assumed to 
beguile the unwary, and harmless or vicious, ac- 
cording to circumstances. It is seen at its worst in 
the Sunday editions, with their sheets as many 

— as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks 
In Vallombrosa. 

It is safe to say that for the faithful reader of 
the Sunday newspaper there is no intellectual sal- 
vation. Like the Prodigal Son, he is fain to fill 
his belly with the husks which the swine do eat, 
and he has not the grace even to long for the more 
dignified diet of fatted calf. 

The newspaper habit is pretty generally recog- 
nized as demoralizing, and in so far it may be in a 
literary point of view less dangerous than the mag- 
azine habit. The latter is often accompanied by a 
self-righteous conviction that it is a virtue. There 
is a class who take on airs of being of the intellec- 



164 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tual elect on the strength of reading all the leading 
magazines ; who are as proud of having four serials 
in hand at once as is a society belle of being able 
to drive as many horses ; who look with a sort of 
pitying contempt upon persons so old-fashioned as 
to neglect the magazines in favor of books, and who 
in general are as proudly patronizing in their atti- 
tude toward literature as they are innocent of any 
connection with it. This is worse than too great 
a fondness for journalism, and of course this is an 
extreme type ; but it is to be feared that at their 
best the magazines represent mental dissipation. 

It is true that genuine literature is often pub- 
lished in periodicals ; and there are many editors 
who deeply regret that the public will not allow 
them to print a great deal more. As things are, 
real literature in the magazines is the exception 
rather than the rule. The general standard of 
magazine excellence is the taste of the intellectually 
nouveaux riches — for persons who have entered 
upon an intellectual heritage which they are not 
fitted rightly to understand or employ are as com- 
mon as those who come to material wealth under 
the same conditions. It is to this class, which is 
one of the most numerous, and still more one of the 
most conspicuous in our present civilization, that 
most of the magazines address themselves. The 
genuinely cultivated reader finds in the monthlies 
many papers which he looks through as he looks 
through the newspaper, for the sake of information, 
and less often he comes upon imaginative work. 
The serials which are worth reading at all are worthy 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 165 

of being read as a whole, and not in the distorted and 
distorting fashion of so many words a month, ac- 
cording to the size of the page of a particular peri- 
odical. Reading a serial is like plucking a rose petal 
by petal ; the whole of the flower may be gathered, 
but its condition is little likely to be satisfactory. 
While the magazines, moreover, are not to be 
looked to for a great deal of literature of lasting 
value, they not only encourage the habit of reading 
indifferent imitations, but they foster a dangerous 
and demoralizing inability to fix the attention for 
any length of time. The magazine-mind is a thing 
of shreds and patches at best ; incapable of grasp- 
ing as a whole any extended work. Literature 
holds the mirror up to nature, but the magazine is 
apt to show the world through a toy multiplying- 
glass, which gives to the eye a hundred minute and 
distorted images. 

It may seem that I do scant justice to the mag- 
azines. It is certainly to be remembered that in 
the less thickly, settled parts of this great incho- 
ate country, where libraries are not, the magazine 
is often a comfort and even an inspiration. It is 
to be acknowledged that, with the enormous mass 
of half - educated but often earnest and sincere 
souls, the periodical has done and may still do a 
great deal of good. The child must play with toys 
before it is fitted to grasp the tools of handicraft, 
and enjoyment of the chromo may be a healthy 
and legitimate stage on the way to an appreciation 
of the masters of painting. It is not a reproach to 
call a man a toy-vender or a maker of chromos; 



166 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

nor do I see that what I have been saying is to be 
interpreted as reflecting on the makers of periodi- 
cals. It must be remembered that the publication 
of a magazine is a business enterprise in the same 
sense that the selling of carpets or calicoes is a 
business enterprise. The manufacturer of maga- 
zines must please the general public with what he 
prints, as the manufacturer must satisfy the ordi- 
nary buyer by the designs of his fabrics. In either 
case it is the taste of the intellectual bourgeoisie 
which is the standard of success. The maker of 
periodicals can no more afford to appeal to the 
taste of the cultivated few than can the thrifty 
maker of stuffs. What is sold in open market 
must be adapted to the demands of the open mar- 
ket. It is simply legitimate business prudence 
which keeps most magazines from attempting to 
print literature. They publish, as a rule, all the 
literature that the public will have, — modified, 
unhappily, by the difficulty of getting it to pub- 
lish in a world where literature cannot be made to 
order. A book, it is to be remembered, is a ven- 
ture ; a magazine is an enterprise. The periodical 
must pay or it must be discontinued. 

The moral of the whole matter is that the only 
thing to do is to accept magazines for what they 
are ; neither to neglect them completely, nor to 
give to them that abundant or exclusive attention 
which they cannot even aim under existing condi- 
tions at deserving. They may easily be dangerous 
intellectual snares ; but the wise student will often 
find them enjoyable, and sometimes useful, 



XIII 

NEW BOOKS AND OLD 

The quality of " timeliness " is one of the things 
which makes it especially difficult to distinguish 
among new books. There is in this day an ever 
increasing tendency to treat all topics of popular 
discussion in ways which profess to be imaginative, 
and especially in the narrative form. The novel 
with a theory and the poem with a purpose are so 
enveloped with the glamour of immediate interest 
that they appear to be of an importance far be- 
yond that which belongs to their real merit. Curi- 
osity to know what these books have to say upon 
the questions which most deeply interest or most 
vitally affect humanity is as natural as it is diffi- 
cult to resist. The desire to see what a book 
which is talked about is like is doubly hard to 
overcome when it is so easily excused under the 
pretense of gaining light on important questions. 
Time seems to be proving, however, that the 
amount of noise made over these theory-mongering 
romances is pretty nearly in adverse ratio to their 
worth. We are told in Scripture that wisdom 
calleth in the streets, and no man regardeth, but 
the opposite seems to be true of the clamors of 
error. The very vehemence of these books is the 



168 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

quality which secures to them attention ; and it is 
impossible wholly to ignore them, and yet to keep 
in touch with the time. 

It is the more difficult to evade pretentious and 
noisily worthless writings because of the great in- 
genuity of the advertising devices which force them 
upon the attention. The student of genuine litera- 
ture naturally does not allow himself to be led by 
these, no matter how persuasive they may be. The 
man who bases his choice of books upon the ad- 
vertisements is like him who regulates the health 
of his family by the advice of a patent-medicine 
almanac. It is not easy, however, to escape en- 
tirely from the influence of advertising. If we have 
seen a book talked about in print, been confronted 
with its title on a dazzling poster, if it has been 
recommended by the chief prize-fighter in the land, 
or damned by the admiration of Mr. Gladstone, we 
are any of us inclined to read it, just to see what 
it is like. The ways by which new publications 
are insinuated upon the attention are, too, so im- 
palpably effective, so cunningly unexpected, that 
we take our opinion from them without realizing 
that we have not originated it. The inspiration 
and stress of soul which in Greece begot art, bring 
forth in our day advertising, and no man can 
wholly escape its influence. 

Innumerable are the methods by which authors, 
whose sole claim to genius is this skill in advertis- 
ing, keep themselves and their books before the 
public. Eccentricities of manner and of matter 
are so varied as to provoke wonder that mental 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 169 

fertility of resource so remarkable should not pro- 
duce results really great and lasting. Some writ- 
ers claim to be founders of schools, and talk a 
good deal about their " modernity," a word which 
really means stale sensationalism revamped ; others 
insist in season aud out of season that they have 
discovered the only true theory of art, and that 
literature is only possible upon the lines which they 
lay down. It is unfortunately to be observed that 
the theory invariably follows the practice ; that 
they first produce queer books, and then formulate 
a theory which excuses them. Still others call at- 
tention to themselves by a variety of artifices, from 
walking down Piccadilly mooning over a sunflower 
to driving through the Bois de Boulogne in brocade 
coat, rose-pink hat, and cravat of gold-lace, like 
Barbey d'Aur evilly. No man ever produced good 
art who worked to advertise himself, and fortu- 
nately the day of these charlatans is usually short. 
I have spoken in another place of the danger of 
confounding an author and his work ; and of course 
this peril is especially great in the case of writers 
of our own time. I may add that the parading 
of authors is a vice especially prevalent in the 
nineteenth century. Mrs. Leo Hunter advertises 
herself, and incidentally the celebrities whom she 
captures, and the publishers not infrequently show 
a disposition to promote the folly for the sake of 
their balance-sheet. If Apollo and the Muses re- 
turned to earth they would be bidden instantly to 
one of Mrs. Hunter's Saturday five o' clocks, and 
a list of the distinguished guests would be in the 



170 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Sunday papers. That is what many understand by 
the encouragement of literature. 

Another method of securing notice, which is 
practiced by not a few latter-day writers, is that 
of claiming startling originality. Many of the 
authors who are attempting to take the kingdom 
of literary distinction by violence lay great stress 
upon the complete novelty of their views or their 
emotions. Of these, it is perhaps sufficient to say 
that the men who are genuine insist that what 
they say is true, not that they are the first to say 
it. In all art that is of value the end sought is 
the work and not the worker. Perhaps most vi- 
cious of all these self -advertisers are those who force 
themselves into notice by thrusting forward what- 
ever the common consent of mankind has hitherto 
kept concealed. It is chiefly to France that we 
owe this development of recent literature so-called. 
If a French writer wishes to be effective, it is ap- 
parently his instant instinct to be indecent. The 
trick is an easy one. It is as if the belle who 
finds herself a wall-flower at a ball should begin 
loudly to swear. She would be at once the centre 
of observation. 

Of books of these various classes Max Nordau 
has made a dismal list in " Degeneration," a book 
itself discouragingly bulky, discouragingly opinion- 
ated, discouragingly prejudiced and illogical, and 
yet not without much rightness both of perception 
and intention. He says of the books most popular 
with that portion of society which is most in evi- 
dence, that they 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD^ 171 

diffuse a curious perfume, yielding distinguishable 
odors of incense, eau de Lubin, and refuse, one or the 
other preponderating alternately. . . . Books treat- 
ing of the relations of the sexes, with no matter how- 
little reserve, seem too dully moral. Elegant titil- 
lation only begins where normal sexual relations leave 
off. . . . Ghost-stories are very popular, but they 
must come on in scientific disguise, as hypnotism, tel- 
epathy, or somnambulism. So are marionette plays, 
in which seemingly naive but knowing rogues make 
used-up old ballad dummies babble like babies or 
idiots. So are esoteric novels in which the author 
hints that he could say a deal about magic, fakir- 
ism, kabbala, astrology, and other white and black arts 
if he chose. Readers intoxicate themselves in the 
hazy word-sequences of symbolic poetry. Ibsen de- 
thrones Goethe ; Maeterlinck ranks with Shakespeare ; 
Neitzsche is pronounced by German and even French 
critics to be the leading German writer of the day; 
the "Kreutzer Sonata" is the Bible of ladies, who are 
amateurs in love, but bereft of lovers ; dainty gentle- 
men find the street ballads and gaol-bird songs of Jules 
Jouy, Bruant, MacNab, and Xanroff very distingue 
on account of " the warm sympathy pulsing in them, " 
as the phrase runs; and society persons, whose creed 
is limited to baccarat and the money market, make 
pilgrimages to the Oberammergau Passion-Play, and 
wipe away a tear over Paul Verlaine's invocations to 
the Virgin. — Degeneration, ii. 

This is a picture true of only a limited section 
of modern society, a section, moreover, much smaller 
in America than abroad. Common sense and a 
sense of humor save Americans from many of the 
extravagances to be observed across the ocean. 
There are too many fools, however, even in this 
country. To secure immediate success with these 



172 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

readers a writer need do nothing more than to pro- 
duce erotic eccentricities. There are many intel- 
lectually restless persons who suppose themselves 
to be advancing in culture when they are poring 
over the fantastic imbecilities of Maeterlinck, or 
the nerve -rasping unreason of Ibsen; when they 
are sailing aloft on the hot-air balloons of Tolstoi's 
extravagant theories, or wallowing in the blackest 
mud of Parisian slums with Zola. Dull and jaded 
minds find in these things an excitement, as the 
jaded palate finds stimulation in the sting of fiery 
sauces. There are others, too, who believe that 
these books are great because they are so impres- 
sive. The unreflective reader measures the value 
of a book not by its permanent qualities but by its 
instantaneous effect, and an instantaneous effect is 
very apt to be simple sensationalism. 

It is not difficult to see the fallacy of these amaz- 
ing books. A blackguard declaiming profanely 
and obscenely in a drawing-room can produce in 
^ve minutes more sensation than a sage discours- 
ing learnedly, delightfully, and profoundly could 
cause in years. Because a book makes the reader 
cringe it by no means follows that the author is a 
genius. In literature any writer of ordinary clev- 
erness may gain notoriety if he is willing to be ec- 
centric enough, extravagant enough, or indecent 
enough. An ass braying attracts more attention 
than an oriole singing. The street musician, scrap- 
ing a foundling fiddle, vilely out of tune, compels 
notice ; but the master, freeing the ecstasy en- 
chanted in the bosom of a violin of royal lineage, 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 173 

touches and transports. All standards are con- 
founded if notoriety means excellence. 

There is a sentence in one of the enticing and 
stimulating essays of James Russell Lowell which 
is applicable to these writers who gain reputation 
by setting on edge the reader's teeth. 

There is no work of genius which has not been the 
delight of mankind. — Rousseau and the Sentimental- 



Notice : the delight of mankind ; not the sensa- 
tion, the pastime, the amazement, the horror, or the 
scandal of mankind, — but the delight. This is a 
wise test by which to try a good deal of the best 
advertised literature of the present day. Do not 
ask whether the talked-of book startles, amuses, 
shocks, or even arouses simply ; but inquire, if 
you care to estimate its literary value, whether it 
delights. 

It is necessary, of course, to understand that Mr. 
Lowell uses the word here in its broad significa- 
tion. He means more than the simple pleasure 
of smooth and sugary things. He means the de- 
light of tragedy as well as of comedy ; of " King 
Lear" and "Othello" as well as of "Midsummer 
Night's Dream ; " but he does not mean the nerve- 
torture of " Ghosts " or the mental nausea of 
" L'Assommoir." By delight he means that per- 
suasion which is an essential quality of all genuine 
art. The writer who makes his readers shrink and 
quiver may produce a transient sensation. His 
notoriety is noisily proclaimed by the trumpets of 



174 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

to-day ; but the brazen voice of to-morrow will as 
lustily roar other fleeting successes, and all alike 
be forgotten in a night. 

I insisted in the first of these talks upon the 
principle that good art is " human and wholesome 
and sane." We need to keep these characteris- 
tics constantly in mind; and to make them practi- 
cal tests of the literature upon which we feed our 
minds and our imaginations. We are greatly in 
need of some sort of an artistic quarantine. Lit- 
erature should not be the carrier of mental or 
emotional contagion. A work which swarms with 
mental and moral microbes should be as ruthlessly 
disinfected by fire as if it were a garment contami- 
nated with the germs of fever or cholera. It is 
manifestly impossible that this shall be done, how- 
ever, in the present state of society ; and it follows 
that each reader must be his own health-board in 
the choice of books. 

The practical question which instantly arises is 
how one is to know good books from bad until one 
has read them. How to distinguish between what 
is worthy of attention and what is ephemeral trash 
has perplexed many a sincere and earnest student. 
This is a duty which should devolve largely upon 
trained critics, but unhappily criticism is not to- 
day in a condition which makes it reliable or prac- 
tically of very great assistance where recent publi- 
cations are concerned. The reader is left to his 
own judgment in choosing among writings hot from 
the press. Fortunately the task of discriminating 
is not impossible. It is even far less difficult than 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 175 

it at first appears. The reader is seldom without 
a pretty clear idea of the character of notorious 
books before he touches them. Where the multi- 
tude of publications is so great, the very means of 
advertising which are necessary to bring them into 
notice show what they are. Even should a man 
make it a rule to read nothing until he has a defi- 
nite estimate of its merit, he will find in the end 
that he has lost little. For any purposes of the 
cultivation of the mind or the imagination the 
book which is good to read to-day is good to read 
to-morrow, so that there is not the haste about 
reading a real book that there is in getting through 
the morning paper, which becomes obsolete by noon. 
When one considers, too, how small a portion of 
the volumes published it is possible to have time 
for, and how important it is to make the most of 
life by having these of the best, one realizes that 
it is worth while to take a good deal of trouble, 
and if need be to sacrifice the superficial enjoy- 
ment of keeping in the front rank of the mad mob 
of sensation seekers whose only idea of literary 
merit is noise and novelty. It is a trivial and silly 
vanity which is unhappy because somebody — or 
because everybody — has read new books first. 

There is, moreover, nothing more stupid than 
the attempt to deceive ourselves, — especially if the 
attempt succeeds. Of all forms of lying this is at 
once the most demoralizing and the most utterly 
useless. If we read poor books from puerile or 
unworthy motives, let us at least be frank about it 
in our own minds. If we have taken up with un- 



176 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

wholesome writers from idle curiosity, or, worse, 
from prurient hankering after uncleanness, what 
do we gain by assuring ourselves that we did not 
know what we were doing, or by pretending that 
we have unwillingly been following out a line of 
scientific investigation? Fine theories make but 
flimsy coverings for unhealthy desires. 

Of course this whole matter lies within the domain 
of individual liberty and individual responsibility. 
The use or the abuse of reading is determined by 
each man for himself. To gloat over scorbutic prose 
and lubricious poetry, to fritter the attention upon 
the endless repetition of numberless insignificant 
details, to fix the mind upon phonographic reports 
of the meaningless conversations of meaningless 
characters, to lose rational consciousness in the con- 
fusion of verbal eccentricities which dazzle by the 
cunning with which words are prevented from con- 
veying intelligence, — and the writings of to-day 
afford ample opportunity for doing all of these 
things ! — is within the choice of every reader. It is 
to be remembered, however, that no excuse evades 
the consequence. He who wastes life finds him- 
self bankrupt, and there is no redress. 

Always it is to be remembered that the classics 
afford us the means of measuring the worth of 
what we read. He who pauses to consider a little 
will see at once something of what is meant by 
this. He will realize the wide difference there is 
between familiarity with the permanent literature 
of the world and acquaintance with the most sen- 
sational and widely discussed books of to-day. A 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 111 

man may be a virtuous citizen and a good husband 
and father, with intelligence in his business and 
common sense in the affairs of life, and yet be 
utterly ignorant of how Achilles put the golden 
tress into the hand of dead Patroclus, or of the 
stratagem by which Iphigenia saved the life of 
Orestes at Tauris, or of the love of Palamon and 
Arcite for Emilie the fair, or of whom Gudrun 
married and whom she loved, or of how Sancho 
Panza governed his island, or of the ill-fated loves 
of Romeo and Juliet, or of the agony of Othello, 
or of Hamlet, or Lear, or Perdita, or Portia. The 
knowledge of none of these is necessary to mate- 
rial existence, and it is possible to make a creditable 
figure in the world without it. Yet we are all con- 
scious that the man who is not aware of these cre- 
ations which are so much more real than the major- 
ity of the personages that stalk puppet-like across 
the pages of history, has missed something of which 
the loss makes his life definitely poorer. We can- 
not but feel the enrichment of mind and feeling 
which results from our having in classic pages 
made the acquaintance with these gracious beings 
and shared their adventures and their emotions. 
Suppose that the books most noisily lauded to-day 
were to be tried by the same test. Is a man better 
for knowing with Zola all the diseased genealogy of 
the Rougon-Macquart family, morbid, criminal, and 
foul? Is not the mind cleaner and saner if it has 
never been opened to the entertainment of Pozny- 
scheff, Hedda Gabler, Dr. Rank, Mademoiselle de 
Maupin, Oswald Alving, or any of this unclean 



178 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tribe? It is not that a strong or well-developed 
man will ignore the crime or the criminals of the 
world ; but it is not necessary to gloat over either. 
It is not difficult to learn all that it is necessary to 
know about yellow fever, cholera, or leprosy, with- 
out passing days and nights in the pest hospitals. 

These unwholesome books, however, are part of 
the intellectual history of our time. He who would 
keep abreast of modern thought and of life as it 
is to-day, we are constantly reminded, must take 
account of the writers who are most loudly lauded. 
Goethe has said : " It is in her monstrosities that 
nature reveals herself ; " and the same is measur- 
ably true in the intellectual world. The madness, 
the eccentricity, the indecencies of these books, 
are so many indications by which certain tendencies 
of the period betray themselves. It seems to me, 
however, that this is a consideration to which it is 
extremely easy to give too much weight. To mis- 
take this noisy and morbid class of books, these 
self-parading and sensational authors, for the most 
significant signs of the intellectual condition of the 
time is like mistaking a drum-major for the general, 
because the drum-major is most conspicuous and 
always to the fore, — except in action. The mind 
is nourished and broadened, moreover, by the study 
of sanity. It is the place of the physician to con- 
cern himself with disease ; but as medical treatises 
are dangerous in the hands of laymen, so are works 
of morbid psychology in the hands of the ordinary 
reader. 

Fortunately contemporary literature is not con- 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 179 

fined to books of the unwholesome sort, greatly as 
these are in evidence. We have a real literature 
as well as a false one. Time moves so swiftly that 
we have begun to regard the works of Thackeray 
and Dickens and Hawthorne, and almost of Brown- 
ing and Tennyson, as among the classics. They 
are so, however, by evident merit rather than by 
age, and have not been in existence long enough to 
receive the suffrages of generations. The names 
of these authors remind us how many books have 
been written in our time which endure trium- 
phantly all tests that have been proposed ; books to 
miss the knowledge of which is to lose the opportu- 
nity of making life richer. Certainly we should 
be emotionally and spiritually poorer without the 
story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, 
between whom the Scarlet Letter glowed bale- 
fully ; without Hilda in her tower and poor Mir- 
iam bereft of her Faun below. To have failed to 
share the Fezziwigs' ball, or the trial of Mr. Pick- 
wick for breach of promise ; to have lived without 
knowing the inimitable Sam Weller and the juicy 
Micawbers, the amiable Quilp and the elegant 
Mrs. Skewton, philanthropic Mrs. Jellyby and airy 
Harold Skimpole, is to have failed of acquaintances 
that would have brightened existence ; to be igno- 
rant of Becky Sharp and Colonel Newcome, of 
Arthur Pendennis and George Warrington, of Be- 
atrix and Colonel Esmond, is to have neglected 
one of the blessings, and not of the lesser bless- 
ings either. No man is without a permanent and 
tangible gain who has comprehendingly read Emer- 



180 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

son's "Rhodora," or the "Threnody," or " Da}'s," 
or " The Problem." Whoever has been sympa- 
thetically through the " Idylls of the King " not 
only experienced a long delight but has gained a 
fresh ideal; while to have gone to the heart of 
" The Ring and the Book," — that most colossal 
tour-de-force in all literature, — to have heard the 
tender confidences of dying Pompilia, the anguished 
confession of Caponsacchi, the noble soliloquy of 
the Pope, is to have lived through a spiritual and 
an emotional experience of worth incalculable. In 
the age of Thackeray and Dickens, of Hawthorne 
and Emerson and Tennyson and Browning, we 
cannot complain that there is any lack of genuine 
literature. 

Nor are we obliged to keep to what seems to 
some a high and breathless altitude of reading. 
There are many readers who are of so little natural 
imagination, or who have cultivated it so little, 
that it is a conscious and often a fatiguing effort to 
keep to the mood of these greater authors. Beside 
these works to the keen enjoyment of which imagi- 
nation is necessary, there are others which are genu- 
ine without being of so high rank. It is certainly on 
the whole a misfortune that one should be deprived 
of a knowledge of Mrs. Proudie and the whole 
clerical circle in which she moved, and especially 
of Mr. Harding, the delightful " Warden ; " he is 
surely to be pitied who has not read the story of 
" Silas Marner," who does not feel friendly and 
intimate with shrewd and epigrammatic Mrs. Poy- 
ser, with spiritual Dinah Morris, and with Maggie 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 181 

Tulliver and her family. No intelligent reader 
can afford to have passed by in neglect the pleas- 
ant sweetness of Longfellow or the wholesome 
soundness of Whittier, the mystic sensuousness of 
Rossetti or the voluptuous melodiousness of Swin- 
burne. 

It is manifestly impossible to enumerate all the 
authors who illustrate the richness of the latter 
half of the nineteenth century ; but there are those 
of the living who cannot be passed in silence. To 
deal with those who are writing to-day is mani- 
festly difficult, but as I merely claim to cite illus- 
trations no fault can justly be found with omis- 
sions. Naturally Meredith and Hardy come first 
to mind. He who has read that exquisite chapter 
in " The Ordeal of Richard Fever el " which tells 
of the meeting of Richard and Lucy in the mead- 
ows by the river has in memory a gracious posses- 
sion for the rest of his days. Who can recall from 
" The Return of the Native " the noonday visit of 
Mrs. Yeobright to the house of her son and her 
journey to death back over Egdon Heath, without a 
heart-deep thrill ? What sympathetic reader fails 
to recognize that he is mentally and imaginatively 
richer for the honest little reddle-man, Diggory 
Venn, for sturdy Gabriel Oak, for the delightful 
clowns of " Under the Greenwood Tree " and " Far 
from the Madding Crowd," or for ill-starred Tess 
when on that dewy morning she had the misfortune 
to touch the caddish heart of Angel Clare ? To 
have failed to read and to reread Stevenson, — for 
one thinks of Stevenson as still of the living, — to 



182 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

have passed Kipling by, is to have neglected one of 
the blessings of the time. 

It may be that I have seemed to imply by the 
examples I have chosen that the literature of con- 
tinental Europe is to be shunned. Naturally in 
addressing English-speaking folk one selects exam- 
ples when possible from literature in that tongue ; 
and I have alluded to books in other languages 
only when they brought out more stiikingly than 
do English books a particular point. It is need- 
less to say that in these cosmopolitan days no one 
can afford to neglect the riches of other nations in 
contemporary literature. It is difficult to resist 
the temptation to make lists, to speak of the men 
who in France with Guy de Maupassant at their 
head have developed so great a mastery of style ; 
one would gladly dwell on the genius of Turge- 
nieff, perhaps the one writer who excuses the mod- 
ern craze for Russian books ; or of Sienkiewicz, 
who has only Dumas pere to dispute his place as 
first romancer of the world ; and so on for other 
writers of other lands and tongues. It is unneces- 
sary, however, to multiply examples, and here there 
is no attempt to speak exhaustively even of Eng- 
lish literature. 

The thing to be kept in mind is that it is our 
good fortune to live in the century which in the 
whole course of English literature is outranked by 
the brilliant Elizabethan period only. It is surely 
worth while to attempt to prove ourselves worthy 
of that which the gods have graciously given us. 
Men sigh for the good day that is gone, and imagine 



NEW BOOKS AND OLD 183 

that had they lived then they would have made 
their lives correspondingly rich to match the splen- 
dors of an age now famous. We live in a time 
destined to go down to the centuries not unre- 
nowned for literary achievement ; it is for us to 
prove ourselves appreciative and worthy of this 
time. 



XIV 

FICTION 

Probably the oldest passion of the race which 
can lay any claim to connection with the intellect 
is the love of stories. The most ancient examples 
of literature which have been preserved are largely 
in the form of narratives. As soon as man has so 
far conquered the art of speech as to get beyond 
the simplest statements, he may be supposed to 
begin instinctively to relate incidents, to tell rudi- 
mentary tales, and to put into words the story of 
events which have happened, or which might have 
happened. 

The interest which every human being takes in 
the things which may befall his fellows underlies 
this universal fondness ; and the man who does not 
love a story must be devoid of normal human sym- 
pathy with his kind. It is hardly necessary, at this 
late day, to point out the strong hold upon the 
sympathies of his fellows which the story-teller 
has had from the dawn of civilization. The mind 
easily pictures the gaunt reciters who, in savage 
tribes, repeat from generation to generation the 
stories and myths handed orally from father to son ; 
or the professional narrators of the Orient who re- 
peat gorgeously colored legends and fantastic ad- 



FICTION 185 

ventures in the gate or the market. Perhaps, too, 
the mention of the subject of this talk brings from 
the past the homely, kindly figure of the nurse 
who made our childish eyes grow large, and our 
little hearts go trippingly in the days of pinafores 
and fairy-lore — the blessed days when " once upon 
a time " was the open sesame to all delights. The 
responsiveness of human beings to story-telling the 
world over unites all mankind as in a bond of com- 
mon sympathy. 

What old-fashioned theologians seemed to find 
an inexhaustible pleasure in calling " the natural 
man " has always been strongly inclined to turn in 
his reading to narratives in preference to what our 
grandparents primly designated as " improving 
works." In any library the bindings of the novels 
are sure to be worn, while the sober backs of treat- 
ises upon manners, or morals, or philosophy, or 
even science, remain almost as fresh as when they 
left the bindery. Each reader in his own grade 
selects the sort of tale which most appeals to him ; 
and while the range is wide, the principle of 
selection is not so greatly varied. The shop-girl 
gloats over "The Earl's Bride; or, The Heiress 
of Plantagenet Park." The school - miss in the 
street-car smiles contemptuously as she sees this 
title, and complacently opens the volume of the 
" Duchess " or of Rhoda Broughton which is the 
delight of her own soul. The advanced young 
woman of society has only contempt for such trash, 
and accompanies her chocolate caramels with the 
perusal of " The Yellow Aster," or the " Green 



186 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Carnation," while her mother, very likely, reads 
the felicitous foulness of some Frenchman. Those 
readers who have a sane and wholesome taste, 
properly cultivated, take their pleasure in really 
good novels or stories ; but the fondness for narra- 
tive of some sort is universal. 

It would be manifestly unfair to imply that there 
is never a natural inclination for what is known 
as " solid reading," but such a taste is exceptional 
rather than general. Certainly a person who cared 
only for stories could not be looked upon as hav- 
ing advanced far in intellectual development ; but 
appreciation for other forms of literature is rather 
the effect of cultivation than the result of natural 
tendencies. Most of us have had periods in which 
we have endeavored to persuade ourselves that we 
were of the intellectual elect, and that however 
circumstances had been against us, we did in our 
inmost souls pant for philosophy and yearn for ab- 
stract wisdom. We are all apt to assure ourselves 
that if we might, we should devote our days to the 
study of science and our nights to mastering the 
deepest secrets of metaphysics. We declare to 
ourselves that we have not time ; that just now we 
are wofully overworked, but that in some golden, 
although unfortunately indeterminate future, for 
which we assure ourselves most solemnly that we 
long passionately, we shall pore over tremendous 
tomes of philosophical thought as the bee grapples 
itself to a honey-full clover-blossom. It is all 
humbug ; and, what is more, we know that it is 
humbug. We do not, as a rule, relish the effort 



FICTION 187 

of comprehending and assimilating profoundly 
thoughtful literature, and it is generally more easy 
to read fiction in a slipshod way than it is to glide 
with any amusement over intellectual work. The 
intense strain of the age of course increases this 
tendency to light reading ; but in any age the only 
books of which practically everybody who reads at 
all is fond are the story-books. 

It has been from time to time the habit of busy 
idlers to fall into excited and often acrimonious 
discussion in regard to this general love for stories. 
Many have held that it is an instinct of a fallen 
and unregenerate nature, and that it is to be checked 
at any cost. It is not so long since certain most re- 
spectable and influential religious sects set the face 
steadfastly against novels ; and you may remember 
as an instance that when George Eliot was a young 
woman she regarded novel-reading as a wicked 
amusement. There is to-day a more rational state 
of feeling. It is seen that it is better to accept 
the instincts of human nature, and endeavor to 
work through them than to engage in the well-nigh 
hopeless task of attempting to eradicate them. To- 
day we are coming to recognize the cunning of the 
East in inculcating wisdom in fables and the pro- 
found lesson of the statement in the Gospels : 
" Without a parable spake He not unto them." 

Much of the distrust which has been in the past 
felt in regard to fiction has arisen from a narrow 
and uncomprehending idea of its nature. Formalists 
have conceived that the relating of things which 



188 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

never occurred — which indeed it was often im- 
possible should occur, — is a violation of truth. 
The fundamental ground of most of the objections 
which moralists have made to fiction has been the 
assumption that fiction is false. Of certain kinds 
of fiction this is of course true enough, but of fic- 
tion which comes within the range of literature it 
is conspicuously incorrect. 

Fiction is literature which is false to the letter 
that it may be true to the spirit. It is unfettered 
by narrow actualities of form, because it has to 
express the higher actualities of emotion. It uses 
incident and character as mere language. It is as 
unfair to object to the incidents of a great novel 
that they are untrue, as it would be to say that the 
letters of a word are untrue. There is no question 
of truth or untruth beyond the question whether 
the symbols express that which they are intended 
to convey. The letters are set down to impart to 
the intelligence of the reader the idea of a given 
word ; the incidents of a novel are used to embody 
a truth of human nature and life. Truth is here 
the verity of the thing conveyed. In a narrow 
and literal sense Hamlet and Othello and Colonel 
Newcome and Becky Sharp are untrue. They 
never existed in the flesh. They have lived, how- 
ever, in the higher and more vital sense that they 
have been part of the imagination of a master. 
They are true in that they express the truth. It 
is a dull misunderstanding of the value of things 
to call that book untrue which deals with fictitious 
characters wisely, yet to hold as verity that which 



FICTION 189 

records actual events stolidly and unappreciatively. 
The history may be false from beginning to end 
and the fiction true. Fiction which is worthy of 
consideration under the name of literature is the 
truest prose in the world ; and I believe that it 
is not without an instinctive recognition of this 
fact that mankind has so generally taken it to its 
heart. 

The value of at least certain works of fiction has 
come to be generally recognized by the intellectual 
world. There are some novels which it is taken 
for granted that every person of education has 
read. Whoever makes the smallest pretense of 
culture must, for instance, be at least tolerably 
familiar with Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and Haw- 
thorne ; while he will find it difficult to hold the 
respect of cultivated men unless he is also ac- 
quainted with Miss Austen, George Eliot, and 
Charlotte Bronte, with Dumas pere, Balzac, and 
Victor Hugo, and with the works of leading living 
writers of romance. " Don Quixote " is as truly a 
necessary part of a liberal education as is the mul- 
tiplication table ; and it would not be difficult to 
extend the list of novels which it is assumed as a 
matter of course that persons of cultivation know 
familiarly. 

Nor is it only the works of the greater writers of 
imaginative narration which have secured a general 
recognition. If it is not held that it is essential 
for an educated man to have read Trollope, Charles 
Reade, Kingsley, or Miss Mulock, for example, it 
is at least recognized that one had better have 



190 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

gained an acquaintance with these and similar 
writers. Traill, the English critic, speaks warmly 
of the books which while falling below the first 
rank are yet richly worth attention. He says with 
justice : — 

The world can never estimate the debt that it owes 
to second-class literature. Yet it is basely afraid to 
acknowledge the debt, hypocritically desiring to con- 
vey the impression that such literature comes to it in 
spite of protest, calling off its attention from the great 
productions. 

It is true enough that there f is a good deal of 
foolish pretense in regard to our genuine taste in 
reading, but in actual practice most persons do in 
the long run read chiefly what they really enjoy. 
It is also true that there are more readers who are 
capable of appreciating the novels of the second 
grade than there are those who are in sympathy 
with fiction of the first. The thing for each indi- 
vidual reader is to see to it that he is honest in this 
matter with himself, and that he gives attention to 
the best that he can like rather than to the poorest. 

Even those who accept the fact that cultivated 
persons will read novels, and those who go so far 
as to appreciate that it is a distinct gain to the 
intellectual life, are, however, very apt to be trou- 
bled by the dangers of over-indulgence in this sort 
of literature. It has been said and repeated innum- 
erable times that the excessive reading of novels is 
mentally debilitating and even debauching. This 
is certainly true. So is it true that there is great 
mental danger in the excessive readiog of philoso- 



FICTION 191 

phy or theology, or the excessive eating of bread, 
or the excessive doing of any other thing. The 
favorite figure in connection with fiction has been 
to compare it to opium-eating or to dram-drinking ; 
and the moral usually drawn is that the novel- 
reader is in imminent danger of intellectual dis- 
soluteness or even of what might be called the 
delirium tremens of the imagination. I should not 
be honest if I pretended to have a great deal of 
patience with most that is said in this line The 
exclusive use of fiction as mental food is of course 
unwise, and the fact is so patent that it is hardly 
worth while to waste words in repeating it. When 
I said a moment ago that there is danger in the 
eating of bread if it is carried to excess I indicated 
what seems to me to be the truth in this matter. 
If one reads good and wholesome fiction, I believe 
that the natural instincts of the healthy mind may 
be trusted to settle the question of how much shall 
be read. If the fiction is unhealthy, morbid, or 
false, any of it is bad. If it is good, if it calls into 
play a healthy imagination, there is very little dan- 
ger that too much of it will be taken. When there 
is complaint that a girl or a boy is injuring the 
mind by too exclusive a devotion to novels, I be- 
lieve that it generally means, if the facts of the 
case were understood, that the mind of the reader 
is in an unwholesome condition, and that this ex- 
cessive devotion to fiction is a symptom rather than 
a disease. When the girl coughs, it is not the 
cough that is the trouble ; this is only a symptom 
of the irritation of membranes ; and I believe that 



192 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

much the same is the case with extravagant novel- 
readers. 

Of course this view of the matter will not com- 
mend itself to everybody. It is hard for us to 
shake off the impression of all the countless homi- 
lies which have been composed against novel-read- 
ing ; and we are by no means free from the poison 
of the ascetic idea that anything to which mankind 
takes naturally and with pleasure cannot really be 
good in itself. I hope, however, that it will not 
appear to you unreasonable when I say that it 
seems to me far better to insist upon proper meth- 
ods of reading and upon the selection of books 
which are genuine literature than to wage unavail- 
ing war against the natural love of stories which is 
to be found in every normal and wholesome human 
being. If I could be assured that a boy or a girl 
read only good novels and read them appreciatively 
and sympathetically, I should never trouble my- 
self to inquire how many he or she read. I should 
be hopefully patient even if there was apparently 
a neglect of history and philosophy. I should be 
confident that it is impossible that the proper read- 
ing of good fiction should not in the end both prove 
beneficial in itself and lead the mind to whatever 
is good in other departments of literature. I am 
not pleading for the indiscriminating indulgence 
in doubtful stories. I do not believe that girls are 
brought to fine and well-developed womanhood by 
an exclusive devotion to the chocolate-caramel-and- 
pickled-lime sort of novels. I do not hold that 
boys come to nobility and manliness through the 



FICTION 193 

influence of sensational tales wherein blood-boul- 
tered bandits reduce to infinitesimal powder every 
commandment of the decalogue. I do, however, 
thoroughly believe that sound and imaginative fic- 
tion is as natural and as wholesome for growing 
minds as is the air of the seashore or the moun- 
tains for growing bodies. 

The fact is of especial importance as applied to 
the education of children. A healthy child is in- 
stinctively in the position of a learner. He is un- 
consciously full of deep wonderment concerning 
this world in which he finds himself, and concern- 
ing this mysterious thing called life in which he has 
a share. His mind is eager to receive, but it is 
entirely free from any affectation. A child accepts 
what appeals to him directly, and he is without 
scruple in neglecting what does not interest him. 
He learns only by slow degrees that knowledge 
may have value and interest from its remote bear- 
ings ; and in dealing with him in the earlier stages 
of mental development there is no other means so 
sure and effective as story-telling. It is here that 
a child finds the specific and the concrete while he 
is still too immature to be moved by the general 
and the abstract. 

It is " to cater to this universal taste," the cir- 
culars of the publishers assure us, that so-called 
"juvenile literature " was invented. I do not wish 
to be extravagant, but it does seem to me that 
modern juvenile literature has blighted the rising 
generation as rust blights a field of wheat. The 
holiday counters are piled high with hastily writ- 



194 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ten, superficial, often inaccurate, and, what is most 
important of all, unimaginative books. The nur- 
sery of to-day is littered with worthless volumes, 
and the child halfway through school has already 
outlived a dozen varieties of books for the young. 

A good many of these works are as full of infor- 
mation as a sugar-coated pill is of drugs. Thirst 
for practical information is one of the extrava- 
gances of the age. Parents to-day make their chil- 
dren to pass through tortures in the service of what 
they call " practical knowledge " as the unnatural 
parents of old made their offspring to pass through 
the fires of Moloch. We are all apt to lose sight 
of the fact that wisdom is not what a man knows 
but what he is. The important thing is not what 
we drill into our children, but what we drill them 
into. There are times when it is the most pro- 
found moral duty of a parent to substitute Grimm's 
fairy stories for text-books, and to devote the whole 
stress of educational effort to the developing of the 
child's imagination. I am not at all sure that it 
is not of more importance to see to it that a child 
— and especially a boy — is familiar with " the land 
east of the sun and west of the moon " than to stuff 
his brain with the geographical details of the wilds 
of Asia, Africa, or the isles of the far seas. I am 
sure that he is better off from knowing about Sind- 
bad and Ali Baba than for being able to extract 
a cube root. I do not wish to be understood as 
speaking against the imparting of practical infor- 
mation, although I must say that I think that the 
distinction between what is really practical and 



FICTION 195 

what is not seems to me to be somewhat confused 
in these days. I simply mean that just now there 
is need of enforcing the value of the imaginative 
side of education. No accumulation of facts can 
compensate for the narrowing of the growing mind ; 
and indeed facts are not to be really grasped and 
assimilated without the development of the realiz- 
ing — the imaginative — faculty. 

It is even more important for children than for 
adults that their reading shall be imaginative. 
The only way to protect them against worthless 
books is to give them a decided taste for what is 
good. It is only after children have been debauched 
by vapid or sensational books that they come to 
delight in rubbish. It is easier in the first place 
to interest them in real literature than in shams. 
The thing is to take the trouble to see to it that 
what they read is fine. The most common error 
in this connection is to suppose that children need 
an especial sort of literature different from that 
suited to adults. As far, certainly, as serious edu- 
cation is concerned, there is neither adult literature 
nor juvenile literature ; there is simply literature. 
Speaking broadly, the literature best for grown 
persons is the literature best for children. The 
limitations of youth have, and should have, the 
same effects in literature as in life. They restrict 
the comprehension and appreciation of the facts 
of life ; and equally they set a bound to the com- 
prehension and appreciation of what is read. The 
impressions which a child gets from either are not 
those of his elders. The important thing is that 



196 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

what the growing mind receives shall be vital and 
wholesome. It is less unfortunate for the child to 
mistake what is genuine than to receive as true 
what is really false. We all commit errors in the 
conclusions which we draw from life ; and so will 
it be with children and books. Books which are 
wise and sane, however, will in time correct the 
misconceptions they beget, as life in time makes 
clear the mistakes which life has produced. 

The whole philosophy of reading for children is 
pretty well summed up by implication in the often 
quoted passage in which Charles Lamb describes 
under the disguise of Bridget Elia, the youthful 
experience of his sister Mary : — 

She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into 
a spacious closet of good old English reading, without 
much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will 
upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I 
twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in 
this fashion. — Mackery End. 

Fiction — to return to the immediate subject of 
this talk — is only a part of a child's education, 
but it is a most essential part ; and it is of the great- 
est importance that the fiction given to a young 
reader be noble ; that it be true to the essentials of 
life, as it can be true only if it is informed by a 
keen and sane imagination. Children should be 
fed on the genuine and sound folk-tales like those 
collected by the brothers Grimm ; the tales of 
Hans Christian Andersen, of Asbjornsen, of Labou- 
laye, and of that delightful old lady, the Countess 
d'Aulnoy ; the fine and robust " Morte d' Arthur " 



FICTION 197 

of Malory ; the more modern classics, " Robinson 
Crusoe " and " Gulliver." Then there are Haw- 
thorne's " Tanglewood Tales " and the " Wonder- 
Book," " Treasure Island " and " Kidnapped," 
" Uncle Remus," and the " Jungle Books." It 
may be claimed that these are " juvenile " litera- 
ture ; but I have named nothing of which I, at 
least, am not as fond now as in my youth, and I 
have yet to discover that adults find lack of inter- 
est in good books even of fairy stories. What 
has been said against juvenile literature has been 
intended against the innumerable works mustered 
under that name which are not literature at all. 
Wonder lore is as normal food for old as for 
young, and there is no more propriety in confining 
it to children than there is in limiting the use of 
bread and butter to the inhabitants of the nursery. 
It is neither possible nor wise to attempt here a 
catalogue of books especially adapted to children. 
I should myself put Spenser high in the list, and 
very likely include others which common custom 
does not regard as well adapted to the young. 
These, of course, are books to be read to the child, 
not that he at first can be expected to go pleasur- 
ably through alone. Prominent among them I 
would insist first, last, and always upon Shake- 
speare. If it were practically possible to confine 
the reading of a child to Shakespeare and the 
Bible, the whole question would be well and wisely 
settled. Since this cannot be, it is at least essen- 
tial that a child be given both as soon as he can 
be interested in them, — and it is equally impor- 



198 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tant that lie be given neither until they do attract 
him. He is to be guided and aided, but there 
cannot be a more rich and noble introduction to 
fiction than through the inspired pages of Shake- 
speare, and the child who has been well grounded 
in the greatest of poets is not likely ever to go very 
widely astray in his reading. 



XV 

FICTION AND LIFE 

The reading of fiction has come to have an im- 
portant and well recognized place in modern life. 
However strong may be the expression of disappro- 
bation against certain individual books, no one in 
these days attempts to deny the value of imagina- 
tive literature in the development of mind and the 
formation of character ; yet so strong is the Puri- 
tan strain in the blood of the English race that 
there is still a good deal of lingering ascetic disap- 
proval of novels. 

It must be remembered in this connection that 
there are novels and novels. The objections which 
have from time to time been heaped upon fiction 
in general are more than deserved by fiction in par- 
ticular ; and that, too, by the fiction most in evi- 
dence. The books least worthy are for the most part 
precisely those which in their brief day are most 
likely to excite comment. That the flaming scar- 
let toadstools which irresistibly attract the eye in 
the forest are viciously poisonous does not, however, 
alter the fact that mushrooms are at once delicious 
and nutritious. It is no more logical to condemn 
all fiction on account of the worthlessness or hurt- 
fulness of bad books than it would be to denounce 



200 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

all food because things have often been eaten 
which are dangerously unwholesome. 

The great value of fiction as a means of intellec- 
tual and of moral training lies in the fact that man 
is actually and vitally taught nothing of import- 
ance save by that which really touches his feelings. 
Advice appeals to the intellect, and experience to 
the emotions. What has been didactically told to 
us is at best a surface treatment, while what we 
have felt is an inward modification of what we are. 
We approve of advice, and we act according to 
experience. Often when we have decided upon one 
course of life or action, the inner self which is the 
concrete result of our temperament and our experi- 
ences goes quietly forward in a path entirely differ- 
ent. What we have resolved seldom comes to pass 
unless it is sustained by what we have felt. For 
centuries has man been defining himself as a being 
that reasons while he has been living as a being 
that feels. 

The sure hold of fiction upon mankind depends 
upon the fact that it enables the reader to gain ex- 
perience vicariously. Seriously and sympatheti- 
cally to read a story which is true to life is to live 
through an emotional experience. How vivid this 
emotion is will manifestly depend upon the imagi- 
native sympathy with which one reads. The young 
man who has appreciatively entered into the life of 
Arthur Pendennis will hardly find that he is able to 
go through the world in a spirit of dandified self- 
complaisance without a restraining consciousness 
that such an attitude toward life is most absurd 



FICTION AND LIFE 201 

folly. A man of confirmed worldliness is perhaps 
not to be turned from his selfish and ignoble living 
by studying the history of Major Pendennis, to 
read about whom is not unlike drinking dry and 
rare old Madeira ; yet it is scarcely to be doubted 
that an appreciation of the figure cut by the old 
beau, fluttering over the flowers of youth like a 
preserved butterfly poised on a wire, must tend to 
lead a man to a different career. No reader can 
have felt imaginatively the passionate spiritual 
struggles of Arthur Dimmesdale without being 
thereafter more sensitive to good influences and 
less tolerant of self-deception and concealed sin. 
These are the more obvious examples. The expe- 
riences which one gains from good fiction go much 
farther and deeper. They extend into those most 
intangible yet most real regions where even the 
metaphysician, the psychologist, and the maker of 
definitions have not yet been able to penetrate ; 
those dim, mysterious tracts of the mind which are 
still to us hardly better known than the unex- 
plored mid-countries of Asia or Africa. 

As a means of accomplishing a desired end 
didactic literature is probably the most futile of all 
the unavailing attempts of mankind. In the days 
when ringlets and pantalets were in fashion, when 
small boys wore frilled collars and asked only im- 
proving questions, when the most delirious literary 
dissipation of which the youthful fancy could con- 
ceive was a Rollo book or a prim tale by Maria 
Edge worth, it was generally believed that moral 
precepts and wise maxims had a prodigious influ- 



202 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ence upon the young. It was held possible to 
mould the rising generation by putting one of the 
sentences of Solomon at the head of a copy-book 
page, and to make a permanent impression upon 
the spirit by saws and sermons. If this were ever 
true, it is certainly not true now. If sermon or 
saw has touched the imagination of the hearer, it 
has had some effect which will be lasting ; and this 
the saw does oftener than the sermon, the proverb 
than the precept. If it has won only an intellec- 
tual assent, there is small ground for supposing that 
it will bring about any alteration which will be per- 
manent and effective. 

Taking into account these considerations, one 
might sum up the whole matter somewhat in this 
way : To read fiction is certainly a pleasure ; it is 
to be looked upon as no less important a means of 
intellectual development ; while in the cultivation 
of the moral and spiritual sense the proper use of 
fiction is one of the most effectual and essential 
agencies to-day within the reach of men. In other 
words the proper reading of fiction is, from the 
standpoint of pleasure, of intellectual development, 
or of moral growth, neither more nor less than a 
distinct and imperative duty. 

I have been careful to say, " the proper reading 
of fiction." Whatever strictures may be laid upon 
careless readers in general may perhaps be quadru- 
pled when applied to bad reading of novels. It is 
the duty of nobody to read worthless fiction ; and 
it is a species of moral iniquity to read good nov- 
els carelessly, flippantly, or superficially. There is 



FICTION AND LIFE 203 

small literary or intellectual hope for those whom 
Henry James describes as " people who read nov- 
els as an exercise in skipping." There are two 
tests by which the novel-reader is to be tried : What 
sort of fiction does he read, and how does he read 
it ? If the answers to these questions are satisfac- 
tory, the whole matter is settled. 

Of course it is of the first importance that the 
reader think for himself ; that he form his own 
opinions, and have his own appreciations. Small 
minds are like weak galvanic cells ; one alone is 
not strong enough to generate a sensible current ; 
they must be grouped to produce an appreciable 
result. One has no opinion ; while to accomplish 
anything approaching a sensation a whole circle is 
required. It takes an entire community of such 
intellects to get up a feeling, and of course the feel- 
ing when aroused is shared in common. There are 
plenty of pretentious readers of all the latest noto- 
rious novels who have as small an individual share 
in whatever emotion the book excites as a Turkish 
wife has in the multifariously directed affections 
of her husband. It is impossible not to see the 
shallowness, the pretense, and the intellectual de- 
moralization of these readers ; and it is equally idle 
to deny the worthlessness of the books in which 
they delight. 

What, then, is to be learned from fiction, that 
so much stress is to be laid upon the necessity of 
making it a part of our intellectual and moral edu- 
cation? The answer has in part at least been so 
often given that it seems almost superfluous to re- 



204 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

peat it. The more direct lessons of the novel are 
so evident as scarcely to call for enumeration. No- 
body needs at this late day to be told how much 
may be learned from fiction of the customs of dif- 
ferent grades of society, of the ways and habits of 
all sorts and conditions of men, and of the even 
more fascinating if not actually more vitally impor- 
tant manners and morals of all sorts and conditions 
of women. Every reader knows how much may 
be learned from stories of the facts of human re- 
lations and of social existence, — facts which one 
accumulates but slowly by actual experience, while 
yet a knowledge of them is of so great importance 
for the full appreciation and the proper employ- 
ment and enjoyment of life. 

Civilization is essentially an agreement upon 
conventions. It is the tacit acceptance of condi- 
tions and concessions. It is conceded that if hu- 
man beings are to live together it is necessary that 
there must be mutual agreement, and as civiliza- 
tion progresses this is extended to all departments 
and details of life. What is called etiquette, for in- 
stance, is one variety of social agreement into which 
men have entered for convenience and comfort in 
living together. What is called good breeding is 
but the manifestation of a generous desire to ob- 
serve all those human regulations by which the lives 
of others may be rendered more happy. These 
concessions and conventions are not natural. A 
man may be born with the spirit of good breeding, 
but he must learn its methods. Nature may be- 
stow the inclination to do what is wisest and best 



FICTION AND LIFE 205 

in human relations, but the forms and processes of 
social life and of all human intercourse must be 
acquired. It is one of the functions of fiction to 
instruct in all this knowledge ; and only he who is 
unacquainted with life will account such an office 
trivial. 

Intimate familiarity with the inner characteris- 
tics of humanity, and knowledge of the experiences 
and the nature of mankind, are a still more impor- 
tant gain from fiction. Almost unconsciously the 
intelligent novel-reader grows in the comprehen- 
sion of what men are and of what they may be. 
This art makes the reader a sharer in those mo- 
ments when sensation is at its highest, emotion at 
its keenest. It brings into the life which is out- 
wardly quiet and uneventful, into the mind which 
has few actual experiences to stir it to its deeps, 
the splendid exhilaration of existence at its best. 
The pulse left dull by a colorless life throbs and 
tingles over the pages of a vivid romance; the 
heart denied contact with actualities which would 
awaken it beats hotly with the fictitious passion 
made real by the imagination ; so that life becomes 
forever richer and more full of meaning. 

In one way it is possible to gain from these im- 
aginative experiences a knowledge of life more 
accurate than that which comes from life itself. It 
is possible to judge, to examine, to weigh, to esti- 
mate the emotions which are enjoyed aesthetically ; 
whereas emotions arising from real events benumb 
all critical faculties by their stinging personal qual- 
ity. He who has never shared actual emotional ex- 



206 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

periences has never lived, it is true ; but he who has 
not shared aesthetic emotions has never understood. 

What should be the character of fiction is pretty 
accurately indicated by what has been said of the 
part which fiction should play in human develop- 
ment. Here, as in all literature, men are less influ- 
enced by the appeal to the reason than by the appeal 
to the feelings. The novelist who has a strong 
and lasting influence is not he who instructs men 
directly, but he who moves men. This is instruc- 
tion in its higher sense. The guidance of life must 
come from the reason ; equally, however, must the 
impulse of life come from the emotions. The man 
who is ruled by reason alone is but a curious me- 
chanical toy which mimics the movements of life 
without being really alive. 

This prime necessity of touching and moving the 
reader determines one of the most important points 
of difference between literature and science. It 
forces the story-teller to modify, to select, and to 
change if need be the facts of life, in order to pro- 
duce an impression of truth. Out of the multifari- 
ous details of existence the author must select the 
significant ; out of the real deduce the possibility 
which shall commend itself to the reader as verity. 

Above everything else is an artist who is worthy 
of the name truthful in his art. He never permits 
himself to set down anything which is not a verity 
to his imagination, or which fails to be consistent 
with the conditions of human existence. He real- 
izes that fiction in which a knowledge of the out- 
ward shell and the accidents of life is made the 



FICTION AND LIFE 207 

chief object cannot be permanent and cannot be 
vitally effective. The novelist is not called upon 
to paint life, but to interpret life. It is his privi- 
lege to be an artist ; and an artist is one who sees 
through apparent truth to actual verity. It is his 
first and most essential duty to arouse the inner 
being, and to this necessity he must be ready to sac- 
rifice literal fact. Until the imagination is awake, 
art cannot even begin to do its work. It is true 
that there may be a good deal of pleasant story- 
telling which but lightly touches the fancy and does 
not reach deeper. It is often harmless enough; 
but it is as idle to expect from this any keen or 
lasting pleasure, and still more any mental experi- 
ence of enduring significance, as it would be to ex- 
pect to warm Nova Zembla with a bonfire. What 
for the moment tickles the fancy goes with the mo- 
ment, and leaves little trace ; what touches the im- 
agination becomes a fact of life. 

Macaulay, in his extraordinarily wrong-headed 
essay on Milton, has explicitly stated a very wide- 
spread heresy when he says : — 

We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of 
reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth 
and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. 

This is the ground generally held by unimagina- 
tive men. Macaulay had many good gifts and 
graces, but his warmest admirers would hardly in- 
clude among them a greatly endowed or vigorously 
developed imagination. If one cannot unite the 
advantages of reality and deception, if he cannot 



208 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

join clear discernment of truth to the exquisite en- 
joyment of fiction, it is because he fails of all just 
and adequate comprehension of literature. To call 
fiction deception is simply to fail to understand 
that real truth may be independent of apparent 
truth. It would from the point of view of this sen- 
tence of Macaulay's be competent to open the Gos- 
pels and call the parable of the sower a falsehood 
because there is no probability that it referred to 
any particular incident. The stupidity of criticism 
of fiction which begins with the assumption that it 
is not true is not unlike that of an endeavor to 
swallow a chestnut burr and the consequent decla- 
ration that the nut is uneatable. If one is not 
clever enough to get beneath the husk, his opinion 
is surely not of great value. 

In order to enjoy a novel, it is certainly not 
necessary to believe it in a literal sense. No sane 
man supposes that Don Quixote ever did or ever 
could exist. To the intellect the book is little more 
than a farrago of impossible absurdities. The im- 
agination perceives that it is true to the funda- 
mental essentials of human nature, and understands 
that the book is true in a sense higher than that of 
mere literal verity. It is the cultivated man who 
has the keenest sense of reality, and yet only to the 
cultivated man is possible the exquisite enjoyment 
of " Esmond," of " Les Miserables," " The Scarlet 
Letter," " The Return of the Native," or " The 
Ordeal of Richard Feverel." So far from being 
incompatible, the clear discernment of truth and 
the exquisite enjoyment of fiction are inseparable. 



FICTION AND LIFE 209 

An artist who is worthy of the name is above 
all else truthful in his art. He never permits him- 
self to set down anything which he does not feel to 
be true. It is with a truth higher than a literal 
accuracy, however, that he is concerned. His per- 
ception is the servant of his imagination. He 
observes and he uses the outward facts of life as 
a means of conveying its inner meanings. It is 
this that makes him an artist. The excuse for 
his claiming the attention of the world is that in 
virtue of his imagination he is gifted with an in- 
sight keener and more penetrating than that of his 
fellows ; and his enduring influence depends upon 
the extent to which he justifies this claim. 

With the novel of trifles it is difficult to have 
any patience whatever. The so-called Realistic 
story collects insignificant nothings about a slender 
thread of plot as a filament of cobweb gathers dust 
in a barn. The cobweb seems to me on the whole 
the more valuable, since at least it has the benefit 
of the old wives' theory that it is good to check 
bleeding. It is a more noble office to be wrapped 
about a cut finger than to muffle a benumbed mind. 

One question which the great mass of novel- 
readers who are also students of literature are in- 
terested to have answered is, How far is it well 
to read fiction for simple amusement ? With this 
inquiry, too, goes the kindred one whether it is 
well or ill to relax the mind over light tales of the 
sort sometimes spoken of as " summer reading." 
To this it is impossible to give a categorical reply. 
It is like the question how often and for how long 



.210 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

it is wise to sit down to rest while climbing a hill. 
It depends upon the traveler, and no one else can 
determine a point which is to be decided by feel- 
ings and conditions known alone to him. It is 
hardly possible and it is not wise to read always 
with exalted aims. Whatever you might be ad- 
vised by me or by any other, you would be foolish 
not to make of fiction a means of grateful relaxa- 
tion as well as a help in mental growth. Always 
it is important to remember, however, that there is 
a wide difference in the ultimate result, according 
as a person reads for diversion the best that will 
entertain him or the worst. It is a matter of the 
greatest moment that our amusements shall not be 
allowed to debauch our taste. It is necessary to 
have some standard even in the choice of the most 
foamy fiction, served like a sherbet on a hot sum- 
mer afternoon. One does not read vulgar and 
empty books, even for simple amusement, without 
an effect upon his own mind. The Chinese are 
said to have matches in which cockroaches are 
pitted against each other to fight for the amuse- 
ment of the oblique -eyed heathen. To be thus 
ignoble in their very sports indicates a peculiar 
degradation and poverty of spirit ; and there are 
certain novels so much in the same line that it is 
difficult to think of their being read without seeing 
in fancy a group of pig-tailed Celestials hanging 
breathlessly over a bowl in which struggle the dis- 
gusting little insect combatants. To give the mind 
up to this sort of reading is not to be commended 
in anybody. 



FICTION AND LIFE 211 

Fortunately we are in this day provided with a 
great deal of light fiction which is sound and whole- 
some and genuine as far as it goes. Some of it 
even goes far in the way of being imaginative and 
good. As examples — not at all as a list — may 
be named Blackmore, Crawford, Stanley Weyman, 
Anthony Hope, or the numerous writers of ad- 
mirable short stories, Cable, Miss Jewett, Miss 
Wilkins, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren, or Thomas 
Nelson Page. All these and others may be read 
for simple entertainment, and all are worth read- 
ing for some more or less strongly marked quality 
of permanent worth. There are plenty of writers, 
too, like William Black and Clark Russell and 
Conan Doyle, concerning the lasting value of whose 
stories there might easily be a question, yet who do 
often contrive to be healthily amusing, and who 
furnish the means of creating a pleasant and rest- 
ful vacuity in lives otherwise too full. Every 
reader must make his own choice, and determine 
for himself how much picnicking he will do on his 
way up the hill of life. If he is wise he will con- 
trive to find his entertainment chiefly in books 
which besides being amusing have genuine value ; 
and he will at least see to it that his intellectual 
dissipations shall be with the better of such books 
as will amuse him and not with the poorer. 

The mention of the short story brings to mind 
the great part which this form of fiction plays to- 
day. The restlessness of the age and the fostering 
influence of the magazines have united to develop 
the short story, and it has become one of the most 



212 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

marked of the literary features of the time. It 
has the advantage of being easily handled and 
comprehended as a whole, but it lessens the power 
of seizing in their entirety works which are greater. 
It tends rather to increase than to diminish mental 
restlessness, and the lover of short stories will do 
well not to let any considerable length of time go 
by without reading some long and far-reaching 
novel by way of corrective. Another consequence 
of the wide popularity of the short story is that 
we have nowadays so few additions to that delight- 
ful company of fictitious yet most admirably real 
personages whose acquaintance the reader makes 
in longer tales. The delight of knowing these 
characters is not only one of the most attractive 
joys of novel-reading, but it is one which helps 
greatly to brighten life and enhance friendship. 
Few things add more to the sympathy of comrade- 
ship than a community of friends in the enchanted 
realms of the imagination. Strangers in the flesh 
become instantly conscious of an intimacy in spirit 
when they discover a common love for some char- 
acter in fiction. Two men may be strangers, with 
no common acquaintances in the flesh, but if they 
discover that both admire Elizabeth Bennet, or 
Lizzie Hexam, or Laura Bell, or Ethel Newcome ; 
that both are familiar friends with Pendennis, or 
Warrington, or Harry Kichmond, or Mulvaney, or 
Alan Breck, or Mowgli, or Zagloba; or belong 
to the brave brotherhood of D'Artagnan, Athos, 
Porthos, and Aramis, they have a community of 
sympathy which brings them very close together. 



FICTION AND LIFE 213 

It is seldom and indeed almost never that the 
short story gives to the reader this sense of know- 
ing familiarly its characters. If there be a series, 
as in Kipling's " Jungle Book " or Maclaren's tales, 
where the same actors appear again and again, of 
course the effect may be in this respect the same 
as that of a novel ; but cases of this sort are not 
common. All the aged women of Miss Wilkins' 
stories, for instance, are apt in the memory either 
to blend into one composite photograph of the New 
England old woman, or to stand remotely, not as 
persons that we know, but rather as types about 
which we know. The genuine novel-reader will 
realize that this consideration is really one of no 
inconsiderable weight ; and it is one which becomes 
more and more pressing with the increase of the 
influence of the short story. 

This consideration is the more important from 
the fact that novels in which the reader is able to 
identify himself with the characters are by far the 
most effective, because thus is he removed from 
the realities which surround him, and for the time 
being freed from whatever would hamper his ima- 
gination. That which in real life he would be, but 
may not, he may in fiction blissfully and expand- 
ingly realize. The innate sense of justice — not, 
perhaps, unseconded by the innate vanity; we are 
all of us human ! — demands that human possibili- 
ties shall be realized, and in the story in which the 
reader merges his personality in that of some actor, 
all this is accomplished. In actual outward experi- 
ence life justifies itself but rarely ; to most men its 



214 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

justification is reached only by the aid of the im- 
agination, and it is largely by the aid of literature 
that the imagination works. Even more true is 
this of the other sex. Much that men learn from 
life women must learn from books ; so that to wo- 
men fiction is the primer of life as well as the text- 
book of the imagination. By the novels he reads 
the man gives evidence of his imaginative develop- 
ment ; the woman of her intellectual existence. 

Fiction should be delightful, absorbing, and 
above all inspiring. Genuine art may sadden, but 
it cannot depress ; it may bring a fresh sense of 
the anguish of humanity, but it must from its very 
nature join with this the consolation of an ideal. 
The tragedy of human life is in art held to be 
the source of new courage, of nobler aspiration, 
because it gives grander opportunities for human 
emotion to vindicate its superiority to all disasters, 
all terrors, all woe. The reader does not leave the 
great tragedies with a soured mind or a pessimistic 
disbelief in life. "Lear," "Othello," "Romeo 
and Juliet," tragic as they are, leave him quiver- 
ing with sympathy but not with bitterness. The 
inspiration of the thought of love triumphant over 
death, of moral grandeur unsubdued by the worst 
that fate can do, lifts the mind above the disaster. 
One puts down " The Kreutzer Sonata " with the 
very flesh creeping with disgust at human exist- 
ence ; the same sin is treated no less tragically in 
" The Scarlet Letter," yet the reader is left with 
an inspiration and a nobler feeling toward life. 
The attitude of art is in its essence hopeful, and 



FICTION AND LIFE 215 

the work of the pessimist must therefore fail, even 
though it be informed with all the cleverness and 
the witchery of genius. 

It is, I believe, from something akin to a remote 
and perhaps half -conscious perception of this prin- 
ciple that readers in general desire that a novel 
shall end pleasantly. The popular sentiment in 
favor of a " happy ending " is by no means so 
entirely wrong or so utterly Philistine as it is the 
fashion in these super-aesthetical days to assume. 
The trick of a doleful conclusion has masqued and 
paraded as a sure proof of artistic inspiration when 
it is nothing of the kind. Unhappy endings may 
be more common than happy ones in life, although 
even that proposition is by no means proved ; they 
seem so from the human habit of marking the dis- 
agreeables and letting pleasant things go unnoted. 
Writers of a certain school have assumed from this 
that they were keeping more close to life if they 
left the reader at the close of a story in a state of 
darkest melancholy ; and they have made much 
parade of the claim that this is not only more true 
to fact, but more artistic. There is no reason for 
such an assumption. The artistic climax of a tale 
is that which grows out of the story by compelling 
necessity. There are many narrations, of course, 
which would become essentially false if made to 
end gladly. When the ingenious Frenchman re- 
wrote the last act of " Hamlet," marrying off the 
Prince and dismissing him with Ophelia to live 
happily ever after, the thing was monstrously ab- 
surd. The general public is not wholly blind to 



216 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

these things. No audience educated up to the 
point of enjoying " Hamlet " or " Othello " at all 
would be satisfied with a sugar-candy conclusion 
to these. The public does ask, however, and asks 
justly, that there shall be no meaningless agony ; 
and if it prefers tales which inevitably come to a 
cheerful last chapter, this taste is in the line with 
the great principle that it is the function of art to 
uplift and inspire. 

It has already been said over and over that it is 
the office of literature to show the meaning of life, 
and the meaning of life is not only what it is but 
what it may be. To paint the actualities of life is 
only to state a problem, and it is the mission of art 
to offer a solution. The novel which can go no 
further than the presentation of the apparent fact 
is from the higher standpoint futile because it fails 
to indicate the meaning of that fact ; it falls short 
as art in so far as it fails to justify existence. 

Lowell complains : — 

Modern imaginative literature has become so self- 
conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, 
which should be "the world's sweet inn," whither we 
repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather 
a watering-place, where one's private touch of liver- 
complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other suf- 
ferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. 
— Chaucer. 

We have introduced into fiction that popular 
and delusive fallacy of emotional socialism which 
insists not so much that all shall share the best of 
life, as that none shall escape its worst. The claim 



FICTION AND LIFE 217 

that all shall be acquainted with every phase of 
life is enforced not by an endeavor to make each 
reader a sharer in the joys and blessings of exist- 
ence, but by a determined thrusting forward of the 
pains and shames of humanity. Modern literature 
has too generally made the profession of treating 
all facts of life impartially a mere excuse for deal- 
ing exclusively with whatever is ugly and degraded, 
and for dragging to light whatever has been con- 
cealed. This is at best as if one used rare cups of 
Venetian glass for the measuring out of commercial 
kerosene and vinegar, or precious Grecian urns for 
the gathering up of the refuse of the streets. 

The wise student of literature will never lose 
sight of the fact that fiction which has not in it 
an inspiration is to be looked upon as ineffectual, 
if it is not to be avoided as morbid and unwhole- 
some. Fiction may be sad, it may deal with the 
darker side of existence ; but it should leave the 
reader with the uplift which comes from the per- 
ception that there is in humanity the power to rise 
by elevation of spirit above the bitterest blight, to 
triumph over the most cruel circumstances which 
can befall. 

One word must be added in conclusion, and that 
is the warning that fiction can never take the place 
of actual life. There is danger in all art that 
it may win men from interest in real existence. 
Literature is after all but the interpreter of life, 
and living is more than all imaginative experience. 
We need both the book and the deed to round out 
a full and rich being. It is possible to abuse liter- 



218 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

ature as it is possible to abuse any other gift of the 
gods. It is not impossible to stultify and benumb 
the mind by too much novel-reading ; but of this 
there is no need. Fiction properly used and en- 
joyed is one of the greatest blessings of civiliza- 
tion ; and how poor and thin and meagre would 
life be without it ! 



XVI 

POETRY 

The lover of literature must approach any dis- 
cussion of poetry with feelings of mingled delight 
and dread. The subject is one which can hardly 
fail to excite him to enthusiasm, but it is one with 
which it is difficult to deal without a declaration of 
sentiments so strong that they are not likely to be 
spoken ; and it is one, too, upon which so much 
has been said crudely and carelessly, or wisely and 
warmly, that any writer must hesitate to add any- 
thing to the abundance of words already spoken. 

For there have been few things so voluminously 
discussed as poetry. It is a theme so high that 
sages could not leave it unpraised ; while there is 
never a penny-a-liner so poor or so mean that he 
hesitates to write his essay upon the sublime and 
beautiful art. It is one of the consequences of 
human vanity that the more subtile and difficult a 
matter, the more feeble minds feel called upon to 
cover it with the dust of their empty phrases. The 
most crowded places are those where angels fear to 
tread ; and it is with reverence not unmixed with 
fear that any true admirer ventures to speak even 
his love for the noble art of poetry. No discus- 
sion of the study of literature, however, can leave 



220 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

out of the account that which is literature's crown 
and glory ; and of the much that might be said and 
must be felt, an effort must be made here to set 
something down. 

There are few characteristics more general in 
the race of man than that responsiveness to rhythm 
which is the foundation of the love of verse. The 
sense of symmetry exists in the rudest savage that 
tattoos the two sides of his face in the same pattern, 
or strings his necklace of shells in alternating 
colors. The same feeling is shown by the unses- 
thetic country matron, the mantel of whose sacredly 
dark and cold best room is not to her eye properly 
adorned unless the ugly vase at one end is balanced 
by another exactly similar ugly vase upon the 
other. In sound the instinct is yet more strongly 
marked. The barbaric drum-beat which tells in 
the quivering sunlight of an African noon that the 
cannibalistic feast is preparing appeals crudely to 
the same quality of the human mind which in its 
refinement responds to the swelling cadences of 
Mendelssohn's Wedding March or the majestic 
measures of the Ninth Symphony. The rhythm 
of the voice in symmetrically arranged words is 
equally potent in its ability to give pleasure. Sav- 
age tribes make the beginnings of literature in 
inchoate verse. Indeed, so strongly does poetry 
appeal to men even in the earlier states of civiliza- 
tion that Macaulay seems to have conceived the 
idea that poetry belongs to an immature stage of 
growth, — a deduction not unlike supposing the 



POETRY 221 

sun to be of no consequence to civilization because 
it has been worshiped by savages. In the earlier 
phases of human development, whether of the indi- 
vidual or of the race, the universal instincts are 
more apparent ; and the hold which song takes 
upon half-barbaric man is simply a proof of how 
primal and universal is the taste to which it ap- 
peals. The sense and enjoyment of rhythm show 
themselves in a hundred ways in the life and pleas- 
ures of primitive races, the vigorous shoots from 
which is to spring a splendid growth. 

Not to go so far back as the dawn of civilization, 
however, it is sufficient here to recall our own days 
in the nursery, when Mother Goose, the only uni- 
versal Alma Mater, with rhymes foolish but rhyth- 
mical, meaningless but musical, delighted ears yet 
too untrained to distinguish sense from folly, but 
not too young to enjoy the delight of the beating 
of the voice in metrically arranged accents. 

This pleasure in rhythm is persistent, and it is 
strongly marked even in untrained minds. In na- 
tures unspoiled and healthy, natures not bewildered 
and sophisticated by a false idea of cultivation, or 
deceived into unsound notions of the real value of 
poetry, the taste remains sound and good. In the 
youth of a race this natural enjoyment of verse is 
gratified by folk-songs. These early forms are 
naturally undeveloped and simple, but the lays 
are genuine and wholesome ; they possess lasting 
quality. Different peoples have in differing de- 
grees the power of appreciating verse, but I do not 
know that any race has been found to lack it en- 



222 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tirely. There is abundant evidence that the Anglo- 
Saxon and Norman ancestors from whom sprang 
the English-speaking peoples were in this respect 
richly endowed, and that they early went far in the 
development of this power. The old ballads of our 
language are so rich and so enduringly beautiful 
that we are proved to come from a stock endowed 
with a rich susceptibility to poetry. If this taste 
has not been generally developed it is from some 
reason other than racial incapacity. Nothing need 
be looked for in early literatures sweeter and 
sounder than the fine old ballads of " Chevy 
Chace," " Tamlane," " Sir Patrick Spens," or 
" Clerk Saunders." Many a later poet of no 
mean reputation has failed to strike so deep and 
true a note as rings through these songs made 
by forgotten minstrels for a ballad-loving people. 
There are not too many English-speaking poets 
to-day who could match the cry of the wraith of 
Clerk Saunders at the window of his love : — 

Oh, cocks are crowing a merry midnight, 

The wild fowls are boding day ; 
Give me my faith and troth again, 

Let me fare on my way. . . . 

Cauld mould it is my covering now, 

But and my winding sheet ; 
The dew it falls nae sooner down 

Than my resting-place is weet ! 

How far popular taste has departed from an 
appreciation of verse that is simple and genuine 
is shown by those favorite rhymes which are un- 
wearyingly yearned for in the columns of Notes and 



POETRY 223 

Queries, and which reappear with periodic persist- 
ence in Answers to Correspondents. In educated 
persons, it is true, there is still a love of what is 
really good in verse, but it is far too rare. The 
general ear and the general taste have become 
vitiated. There is a melancholy and an amazing- 
number of readers who are pleased only with 
rhymes of the sort of Will Carleton's " Farm Bal- 
lads," the sentimentally inane jingles published in 
the feminine domestic periodicals, and the rest of 
what might be called, were not the phrase peril- 
ously near to the vulgar, the chewing-gum school 
of verse. 

One of the most serious defects in modern sys- 
tems of education seems to me to be, as has been 
said in an earlier talk, an insufficient provision for 
the development of the imagination. This is no- 
where more marked than in the failure to recog- 
nize the place and importance of poetry in the 
training of the mind of youth. It might be sup- 
posed that an age which prides itself upon being 
scientific in its methods would be clever enough to 
perceive that from the early stages of civilization 
may well be taken hints for the development of the 
intellect of the young. Primitive peoples have in- 
variably nourished their growing intelligence and 
enlarged their imagination by f airy-lore and poetry. 
The childhood of the individual is in its essentials 
not widely dissimilar from the childhood of the 
race ; and what was the instinctive and wholesome 
food for one is good for the other. If our common 
schools could but omit a good deal of the instruc- 



224 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

tion which is falsely called "practical," because it 
deals with material issues, and devote the time thus 
gained to training children to enjoy poetry and to 
use their imagination, the results would be incalcu- 
lably better. 1 

The strain and stress of modern life are opposed 
to the appreciation of any art ; and in the case of 
poetry this difficulty has been increased by a wide- 
spread feeling that poetry is after all of little real 
consequence. It has been held to be an excrescence 
upon life rather than an essential part of it. It is 
the tendency of the time to seek for tangible and 
present results ; and men have too generally ceased 
to appreciate the fact that much which is best is to 
be reached more surely indirectly than directly. 
Since of the effects which spring from poetry those 
most of worth are its remote and intangible results, 
careless and superficial thinkers have come to look 
upon song as an unmanly affectation, a thing arti- 
ficial if not effeminate. This is one of the most 
absolute and vicious of all intellectual errors. In 
high and noble truth, poetry is as natural as air ; 
poetry is as virile as war ! 

It is not easy to discover whence arose the popu- 

1 I say to enjoy poetry. There is much well-meant instruction 
which is unconsciously conducive to nothing hut its detestation. 
Students who hy nature have a fondness for verse are lahoriously 
trained by conscientiously mistaken instructors to regard anything 
in poetical form as a bore and a torment. The business of a 
teacher in a preparatory school should be to incite the pupil to 
love poetry. It is better to make a boy thrill and kindle over a 
single line than it is to get into his head all the comments made 
on literature from the beginning of time. 



POETRY 225 

lar feeling of the insignificance of poetry. It is 
allied to the materialistic undervaluing of all art, 
and it is probably not unconnected with the ascetic 
idea that whatever ministers to earthly delight is 
a hindrance to progress toward the unseen life of 
another world. Something is to be attributed, no 
doubt, to the contempt bred by worthless imita- 
tions with which facile poetasters have afflicted a 
long-suffering world ; but most of all is the want 
of an appreciation of the value of poetry to be at- 
tributed to the fact that men engrossed in literal 
and material concerns have not been able to appre- 
ciate remote consequences, or to comprehend the 
utterances of the masters who speak the language 
of the imagination. 

While the world in general, however, has been 
increasingly unsympathetic toward poetry, the sages 
have universally concurred in giving to it the 
highest place in the list of literary achievements. 
" Poetry," Emerson said, " is the only verity." 
The same thought is expanded in a passage from 
Mrs. Browning, in which she speaks of poets as 

— the only truth-tellers now left to God, — 
The only speakers of essential truth, 
Opposed to relative, comparative, 
And temporal truths ; the only holders hy 
His sun-skirts, through conventual gray glooms ; 
The only teachers who instruct mankind 
From just a shadow on a charnel wall 
To find man's veritable stature out, 
Erect, sublime, — the measure of a man. 

— Aurora Leigh. 

So Wordsworth : — 



226 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all know- 
ledge, it is the impassioned expression which is on the 
face of all science. 

It is needless, however, to multiply quotations. 
The world has never doubted the high respect 
which those who appreciate poetry have for the 
art. 

It is true also that however general at any time 
may have been the seeming or real neglect of poetry, 
the race has not failed to preserve its great poems. 
The prose of the past, no matter how great its wis- 
dom, has never been able to take with succeeding 
generations the rank held by the masterpieces of 
the poets. Mankind has seemed not unlike one 
who affects to hold his jewels in little esteem, it 
may be, yet like the jewel owner it has guarded 
them with constant jealousy. The honor-roll of 
literature is the world's list of great poets. The 
student of literature is not long in discovering that 
his concern is far more largely with verse than with 
anything else that the wit of mankind has devised 
to write. However present neglect may at any 
time appear to show the contrary, the long-abiding 
regard of the race declares beyond peradventure 
that it counts poetry as most precious among all 
its intellectual treasures. 



XVII 

THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 

In discussing poetry it is once more necessary to 
begin with something which will serve us as a defi- 
nition. No man can imprison the essence of an 
art in words ; and it is not to be understood that a 
formal definition can be framed which shall express 
all that poetry is and means. Its more obvious 
characteristics, however, may be phrased, and even 
an incomplete formula is often useful. There have 
been almost as many definitions of poetry made 
already as there have been writers on literature, 
some of them intelligible and some of them open 
to the charge of incomprehensibility. Schopen- 
hauer, for instance, defined poetry as the art of 
exciting by words the power of the imagination ; a 
phrase so broad that it is easily made to cover all 
genuine literature. It will perhaps be sufficient 
for our purpose here if we say that poetry is the 
embodiment in metrical, imaginative' language of 
passionate emotion. 

By metrical language is meant that which is 
systematically rhythmical. Much prose is rhyth- 
mical. Indeed it is difficult to conceive of fine or 
delicate prose which has not rhythm to some de- 
gree, and oratorical prose is usually distinguished 



228 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

by this. The Bible abounds in excellent examples ; 
as, for instance, this passage from Job : — 

Hell is naked before Him, and destruction hath no 
covering; He stretcheth out the north over the empty 
place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. He bind- 
eth up the waters in his thick clouds ; and the cloud 
is not rent under them. He holdeth back the face of 
His throne, and spreadeth His cloud upon it. He 
hath compassed the waters with bounds until the day 
and night come to an end. The pillars of heaven 
tremble, and are astonished at His reproof. He clivid- 
eth the sea with His power, and by His understanding 
He smiteth through the proud. — Job, xxvi. 6—12. 

Here, as in all fine prose, there is a rhythm 
which is marked, and at times almost regular ; but 
it is not ordered by a system, as it must be in the 
simplest verse of poetry. Take, by way of con- 
trast, a stanza from the superb chorus to Artemis 
in " Atalanta in Calydon : " — 

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 

Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
With a noise of winds and many rivers, 

With a clamor of waters and with might ; 
Bind on thy sandals, thou most fleet, 
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet ; 
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 

Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night. 

Here the rhythm is systematized according to reg- 
ular laws, and so becomes metrical. The effect 
upon the ear in prose is largely due to rhythm, but 
metrical effects are entirely within the province of 
poetry. 

This difference between rhythmical and metrical 
language would seem to be sufficiently obvious, but 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 229 

the difficulty which many students have in appre- 
ciating it may make it worth while to give another 
illustration. The following passage from Edmund 
Burke, that great master of sonorous English, is 
strongly and finely rhythmical : — 

Because we are so made as to be affected at such 
spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the un- 
stable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tre- 
mendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in 
those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because 
in events like these our passions instruct our reason; 
because when kings are hurled from their thrones by 
the Supreme Director of this great drama, and be- 
come objects of insult to the base, and of pity to the 
good, we behold such disasters in the moral, as we 
should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. 
— Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

So markedly rhythmical is this, indeed, that it 
would take but little to change it into metre : — 

Because we are so made as to be moved by specta- 
cles like these with melancholy sentiments of the un- 
stable case of mortal things, and the uncertainty of 
human greatness here; because in those our natural 
feelings we may learn great lessons too; because in 
such events our passions teach our reason well; be- 
cause when kings are hurled down from their thrones, 
etc. 

There is no longer any dignity in this. It has be- 
come a sort of sing-song, neither prose nor yet 
poetry. The sentiments are not unlike those of a 
familiar passage in Shakespeare : — 

This is the state of man ; to-day he puts forth 
The tender leaves of hopes ; to-morrow blossoms, 



230 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

And bears his blushing- honors thick upon him : 
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost ; 
And, — when he thinks, good easy man, full surely 
His greatness is a ripening, — nips his root, 
And then he falls, as I do. 

Henry VIIL, iii. 2. 

In the extract from Burke a sense of weakness 
and even of flatness is produced by the rearrange- 
ment of the accents so that they are made regular ; 
while in the verse of Shakespeare the sensitive ear 
is very likely troubled by the single misplaced ac- 
cent in the first line. In any mood save the poetic 
metre seems an artificiality and an affectation, but 
in that mood it is as natural and as necessary as 
air to the lungs. 

Besides being metrical the language of poetry 
must be imaginative. By imaginative language is 
meant that which not only conveys imaginative 
conceptions, but which is itself full of force and 
suggestion ; language which not only expresses 
ideas and emotions, but which by its own power 
evokes them. Imaginative language is marked by 
the most vivid perception on the part of the writer 
of the connotive effect of words ; it conveys even 
more by implication than by direct denotation. It 
may of course be used in poetry or prose. In the 
passage from Job just quoted, the use of such 
phrases as "empty place," " hangeth the earth 
upon nothing," convey more by what they suggest 
to the mind than by their literal assertion. The 
writer has evidently used them with a vital and 
vivid understanding of their suggestiveness. He 
realizes to the full their office to convey impressions 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 231 

so subtle that they cannot be given by direct and 
literal diction. 

Poetry is made up of words and phrases which 
glow with this richness of intention. When 
Shakespeare speaks of skin " smooth as monu- 
mental alabaster," how much is added to the idea 
by the epithet " monumental," the suggestion of 
the polished and protected stone, enshrined on a 
tomb ; how much is due to association and impli- 
cation in such phrases as the " reverberate hills," 
" parting is such sweet sorrow," " the white won- 
der of dear Juliet's hand," " and sleep in dull, cold 
marble," — phrases all of which have a literal sig- 
nificance plain enough, yet of which this literal 
meaning is of small account beside that which they 
evoke. Poetic diction naturally and inevitably 
melts into figures, as when we read of " the shade 
of melancholy boughs," " the spendthrift sun," 
" the bubble reputation," " the inaudible and noise- 
less foot of time; " but the point here is that even 
in its literal words there is constantly the sense and 
the employment of implied meanings. It is by no 
means necessarily figures to which language owes 
the quality of being imaginative. Broadly speak- 
ing, a style may be said to be imaginative in pro- 
portion as the writer has realized and intended its 
suggestions. 

The language of prose is often imaginative to a 
high degree, but seldom if ever to that extent or 
with that deliberate purpose which in verse is no- 
thing less than essential. Genuine poetry differs 
from prose in the entire texture of its web. From 



232 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the same threads the loom may weave plain stuff 
or richest brocade ; and thus of much the same 
words are made prose and poetry. The difference 
lies chiefly in the fashion of working. 

The essentials of the manner of poetry being 
language metrical and imaginative, the essential 
of the matter is that it be the expression of pas- 
sionate emotion. By passionate emotion is meant 
any feeling, powerful or delicate, which is capable 
of filling the whole soul ; of taking possession for 
the time being of the entire man. It may be fierce 
hate, enthralling love, ambition, lust, rage, jealousy, 
joy, sorrow, any over-mastering mood, or it may be 
one of those intangible inclinations, those moods of 
mist, ethereal as hazes in October, those caprices 
of pleasure or sadness which Tennyson had the art 
so marvelously to reproduce. Passionate emotion 
is by no means necessarily intense, but it is en- 
grossing. For the time being, at least, it seems to 
absorb the whole inner consciousness. 

It is the completeness with which such a mood 
takes possession of the mind, so that for the mo- 
ment it is to all intents and purposes the man 
himself, that gives it so great an importance in 
human life and makes it the fitting and the sole 
essential theme of the highest art. Behind all 
serious human effort lies the instinctive sense of 
the fitness of things. The artist must always con- 
vince that his end is worthy of the means which 
he employs to reach it ; and it follows naturally 
that the writer who uses imaginative diction and 
the elaborateness of metre must justify this by 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 233 

what he embodies in them. Metrical forms are as 
much out of place in treating of the material con- 
cerns of life as would be court robes or religious 
rites in the reaping of a field or the selling of a 
cargo of wool. The poet is justified in his use of 
all the resources of form and of poetic diction by 
the fact that the message which he is endeavoring to 
convey is high and noble ; that the meaning which 
he attempts to impart is so profoundly subtle as to 
be inexpressible unless the words which he employs 
are assisted by the language of rhythm and metre. 
That the reader unconsciously recognizes the 
fact that the essential difference in the office of 
prose and poetry makes inevitable a difference also 
of method, is shown by his dissatisfaction when 
the writer of prose invades the province of poetry. 
The arrangement of the words of prose into sys- 
tematic rhythm produces at once an effect of weak- 
ness and of insincerity. Dickens in some of his 
attempts to reach deep pathos has made his prose 
metrical with results most disastrous. The mood 
of poetry is so elevated that metrical conventions 
seem appropriate and natural ; whereas in the mood 
of even the most emotional prose they appear fan- 
tastical and affected. The difference is not unlike 
that between the speaking and the singing voice. 
A man who sang in conversation, or even in a 
highly excited oration, would simply make himself 
ridiculous. In song this manner of using the voice 
is not only natural but inevitable and delightful. 
What would be uncalled for in the most exalted 
moods of the prose writer is natural and fitting in 



234 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the case of the poet, because the poet is endeavor- 
ing to embody, in language the most deep, the most 
high, the most delicate experiences of which human- 
ity is capable. The form is with him a part of his 
normal language. To say in prose : " My love is 
like a red rose newly sprung in June, or like a 
melody beautifully played," means not much. Yet 
the words themselves are not widely varied from 
those in which Burns conveys the same ideas with 
so great an added beauty, and so much more emo- 
tional force : — 

Oh, my hive 's like a red, red rose 

That 's newly sprung in June ; 
Oh, my luve 's like a melodie 

That 's sweetly played in tune. 

The metrical cadences woo the ear like those of a 
melody sweetly played, and to that which the words 
may say or suggest they add an effect yet more 
potent and delightful. 

A moment's consideration of these facts enables 
one to estimate rightly the stricture made by 
Plato : — 

You have often seen what a poor appearance the 
tales of poets make when stripped of the colors which 
music puts upon them, and recited in prose. They are 
like faces which were never really beautiful, but only 
blooming, and now the bloom of youth has passed away 
from them. 

It would be more just and more exact to say 
that they are like the framework of a palace from 
which have been stripped the slabs of precious 
marble which covered it. It is neither more nor 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 235 

less reasonable to object to poetry that its theme 
told in prose is slight or dull than it would be to 
scorn St. Peter's because its rafters and ridgepole 
might not be attractive if they stood out bare 
against the sky. The form is in poetry as much 
an integral part as walls and roof and dome, statues 
and jewel-like marbles, are part of the temple. 

Leaving out of consideration those peculiarities 
such as rhyme and special diction, which although 
often of much effect are not essential since poetry 
may be great without them, it is sufficiently exact 
for a general examination to say that the effects 
of poetry are produced by the threefold union of 
ideas, suggestion, and melody. In the use of ideas 
poetry is on much the same footing as prose, except 
in so far as it deals with exalted moods which have 
no connection with thoughts which are mean or 
commonplace. In the use of suggestion poetry but 
carries farther the means employed in imaginative 
prose. Melody may be said practically to be its 
own prerogative. The smoothest flow of rhythmi- 
cal prose falls far below the melodious cadences 
of metrical language ; and in this manner of appeal 
to the senses and the soul of man verse has no rival 
save music itself. 

These three qualities may be examined sepa- 
rately. Verse may be found in which there is 
almost nothing but melody, divorced from sugges- 
tion or ideas. There are good examples in Edward 
Lear's " Nonsense Songs," in which there is an in- 
tentional lack of sense ; or in the " Alice " books, 
as, for instance : — 



236 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

And as in uffish thought he stood, 
The Jahherwock, with eyes of flame, 

Came "whiffling- through the tulgy wood, 
And hurhled as it came ! . . . 

" And hast thou slain the Jahherwock ? 
Come to my arms, my heamish hoy ! 
frahjous day ! Callooh! Callay!" 
He chortled in his joy. 

Or one may take something which will convey no 
idea and no suggestion beyond that which comes 
with sound and rhythm. Here is a verse once 
made in sport to pass as a folk-song in an unknown 
tongue : — 

Apaulthee kong lay laylarthay ; 

Ameeta tinta prown, 
Lay lista, lay larha, lay moona long, 
Toolay echola doundoolay koko elph zong, 

Im lay melplartha hountaina hrown. 

This is a collection of unmeaning syllables, and yet 
to the ear it is a pleasure. The examples may 
seem trivial, but they serve to illustrate the fact 
that there is magic in the mere sound of words, 
meaning though they have none. 

The possibility of pleasing solely by the arrange- 
ment and choice of words in verse has been a snare 
to more than one poet ; as a neglect of melody has 
been the fault of others. In much of the later 
work of Swinburne it is evident that the poet be- 
came intoxicated with the mere beauty of sound, 
and forgot that poetry demands thought as well 
as melody ; w r hile the reader is reluctantly forced 
to acknowledge that in some of the verse of Brown- 
ing there is a failure to recognize that melody is 
an element as essential as thought. 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 237 

As verse may be found which has little but 
melody, so is it possible to find verse in which there 
is practically nothing save melody and suggestion. 
In " Ulalume " Poe has given an instance of the 
effect possible from the combining of these with 
but the thinnest thread of idea : — - 

The skies they were ashen and sober ; 

The leaves they were crisped and sere, — 

The leaves they were withering and sere ; 
It was night in the lonesome October, 

Of my most immemorial year ; 
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, 

In the misty mid-region of Weir — 
It was down by the dark tarn of Auber, 

In the ghoulrhaunted woodland of Weir. 

There is here no definite train of thought. It is 
an attempt to convey a certain mood by combining 
mysterious and weird suggestion with melody en- 
ticing and sweet. 

A finer example is the closing passage in " Kubla 
Khan." The suggestions are more vivid, and the 
imagination far more powerful. 

A damsel with a dulcimer 

In a vision once I saw ; 

It was an Abyssinian maid, 

And on her dulcimer she played, s 

Singing of Mount Abora. 

Could I revive within me 

Her symphony and song, 

To such deep delight 't would win me, 

That with music loud and long, 

I would build that dome in air, 

That sunny dome ; those caves of ice ; 

And all who heard should see them there, 

And all should cry : " Beware ! Beware ! 

His flashing eyes, his floating hair ; 



238 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

Weave a circle round him thrice, 
And close your eyes with holy dread, 
For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise." 

Here there is a more evident succession of ideas 
than in "Ulalunie;" but in both the effect is 
almost entirely produced by the music and the 
suggestion, with very little aid from ideas. 

How essential to poetry are melody and sugges- 
tion is at once evident when one examines verse 
which contains ideas without these fundamental 
qualities. Wordsworth, great as he is at his best, 
affords ready examples here. The following is by 
no means the least poetical passage in " The Pre- 
lude," but it is sufficiently far from being poetry 
in any high sense to serve as an illustration : — 

I was a better judge of thoughts than words, 

Misled in estimating words, not only 

By common inexperience of youth, 

But by the trade of classic niceties, 

The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 

From languages that want the living voice 

To carry meaning to the natural heart. 

Here are ideas, but there is no emotion, and the 
thing could be said better in prose. It is as fatal 
to try to express in poetry what is not elevated 
enough for poetic treatment as it is to endeavor 
to say in prose those high things which can be 
embodied by poetry only. Melody alone, or sug- 
gestiveness alone, is better than ideas alone if 
there is to be an attempt to produce the effect of 
poetry. 

Poetry which is complete and adequate adds 



THE TEXTURE OF POETRY 239 

melody and suggestion to that framework of ideas 
which is to them as the skeleton to flesh and blood. 
Any of the great lyrics of the language might be 
given as examples. The reader has but to open 
his Shakespeare's " Sonnets " at random, as for in- 
stance, at this : — 

From you have I been absent in the spring, 

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, 

Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing-, 

That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. 

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell 

Of different flowers in odor and in hue, 

Could make me any summer's story tell, 

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew : 

Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, 

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ; 

They were but sweet, but figures of delight, 

Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. 

Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, 

As with your shadow I with these did play. 

It is not necessary to carry this analysis farther. 
The object of undertaking it is to impress upon 
the reader the fact that in poetry form is an essen- 
tial element in the language of the art. The stu- 
dent must realize that the poet means his rhythm 
as truly as and in the same measure that he means 
the thought ; and that to attempt to appreciate 
poetry without sensitiveness to melody is as hope- 
less as would be a similar attempt to try to appre- 
ciate music. When Wordsworth said that poetry 
is inevitable, he meant the metre no less than the 
thought; he wished to convey the fact that the 
impassioned mood breaks into melody of word as 
the full heart breaks into §ong t The true poem is 



240 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the embodiment of what can be expressed in no 
other way than by that especial combination of 
idea, suggestion, and sound. The thought, the 
hint, and the music are united in one unique and 
individual whole. 



XVIII 

POETKY AND LIFE 

Vitally to appreciate what poetry is, it is ne- 
cessary to realize what are its relations to life. 
Looked at in itself its essentials are emotion which 
is capable of taking entire possession of the con- 
sciousness, and the embodiment of this emotion by 
the combined effects of imaginative language and 
melodious form. It is still needful, however, to 
consider how this art acts upon human beings, and 
why there has been claimed for it so proud a pre- 
eminence among the arts. 

Why, for instance, should Emerson speak of 
the embodiment of mere emotion as " the only ver- 
ity," Wordsworth as "the breath and finer spirit 
of all knowledge," and why does Mrs. Browning 
call poets " the only truth-tellers " ? The answer 
briefly is: Because consciousness is identical with 
emotion, and consciousness is life. For all practi- 
cal purposes man exists but in that he feels. The 
universe concerns him in so far as it touches his 
feelings, and it concerns him no farther. That is 
for man most essential which comes most near to 
the conditions of his existence. Pure and ideal 
emotion is essential truth in the sense that it ap- 
proaches most nearly to the consciousness, — that 
is, to the actual being of the race. 



242 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

I am aware that this sounds dangerously like an 
attempt to be darkly metaphysical ; but it is im- 
possible to talk on high themes without to some 
extent using high terms. It is useless to hope to 
put into words all the mysteries of the relations of 
art to life, yet it is not impossible to approximate 
somewhat to what must be the truth of the matter, 
although in doing it one inevitably runs the risk of 
seeming to attempt to say what cannot be said. 
What I have been endeavoring to convey will per- 
haps be plainer if I say that for purposes of our 
discussion man is practically alive only in so far 
as he realizes life. This realization of life, this 
supreme triumph of inner consciousness, comes to 
him through his feelings, — indeed, is perhaps to 
be considered as identical with his feelings. His 
sensations affect him only by the emotions which 
they excite. His emotion, in a word, is the measure 
of his existence. Now the emotion of man always 
responds, in a degree marked by appreciation, to 
certain presentations of the relation of things, to 
certain considerations of the nature of human life, 
and above all to certain demonstrations of the pos- 
sibilities of human existence. If these are made 
actual and clear to the mind, they cannot fail to 
arouse that engrossing realization which is the 
height of consciousness. To enable a man to 
seize with his imagination the ideal of love or 
hate, of fear or courage, of shame or honor, is to 
make him kindle and thrill. It is to make him 
for the time being thoroughly and richly alive, and 
it is to increase greatly his power of essential life. 



POETRY AND LIFE 243 

These are the things which most deeply touch hu- 
man creatures ; they are the universal in that they 
appeal to all sane hearts and minds ; they are the 
eternal as measured by mortal existence because 
they have power to touch the men of all time ; 
hence they are the real truths ; they are, for beings 
under the conditions of earthly existence, the only 
verities. 

The ordinary life of man is not unlike the feeble 
flame of a miner's lamp, half smothered in some 
underground gallery until a draught of vital air 
kindles it into sudden glow and sparkle. Most 
human beings have but a dull flicker of half-alive 
consciousness until some outward breath causes it 
to flash into quick and quivering splendor. Poetry 
is that divine air, that breeze from unsealed heights 
of being, the kindling breath by which the spark 
becomes a flame. 

It is but as a means of conveying the essential 
truth which is the message of poetry, that the poet 
employs obvious truth. The facts which impress 
themselves upon the outer senses are to him merely 
a language by means of which he seeks to impart 
the higher facts that are apprehended only by the 
inner self ; those facts of emotion which it is his of- 
fice as a seer to divine and to interpret. The swine- 
herd and the wandering minstrel saw the same 
wood and sky and lake ; but to one they were earth 
and air and water ; while to the other they were 
the outward and visible embodiment of the spirit 
of beauty which is eternal though earth and sea 
and sky vanish. To Peter Bell the primrose by 



244 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

the river's brim was but a primrose and nothing 
more; to the poet it was the symbol and the em- 
bodiment of loveliness, the sign of an eternal truth. 
To the laborer going afield in the early light the 
dewdrops are but so much water, wetting unpleas- 
antly his shoes ; to Browning it was a symbol of 
the embodiment in woman of all that is pure and 
holy when he sang : — 

There 's a woman like a dew-drop, she 's so purer than the purest. 

It is evident from what has been said that in 
reading poetry it is necessary to penetrate through 
the letter to the spirit. I have already spoken at 
length in a former lecture upon the need of know- 
ing the language of literature, and of being in 
sympathy with the mood of the writer. This is 
especially true in regard to poetry, since poetry 
becomes great in proportion as it deals with the 
spirit rather than with the letter. " We are all 
poets when we read a poem well," Carlyle has 
said. It is only by entering into the mood and 
by sharing the exaltation of the poet that we are 
able to appreciate his message. A poem is like a 
window of stained glass. From without one may 
be able to gain some general idea of its design and 
to guess crudely at its hues ; but really to perceive 
its beauty, its richness of design, its sumptuousness 
of color, one must stand within the very sanctuary 
itself. 

It is partly from the lack of sensitiveness of the 
imagination of the reading public, I believe, that 
in the latter half of this century the novel has 



POETRY AND LIFE 245 

grown into a prominence so marked. The great 
mass of readers no longer respond readily to po- 
etry, and fiction is in a sense a simplification of 
the language of imagination so that it may be com- 
prehended by those who cannot rise to the heights 
of verse. In this sense novels might almost be 
called the kindergarten of the imagination. In 
fiction, emotional experiences are translated into 
the language of ordinary intellectual life ; whereas 
in poetry they are phrased in terms of the imagi- 
nation, pure and simple. There can be no ques- 
tion of the superiority of the means employed by 
the poet. Much which is embodied in verse cannot 
be expressed by prose of any sort, no matter how 
exalted that prose may be ; but for the ordinary 
intelligence the language of prose is far more easily 
comprehensible. 

What I have been saying, however, may seem 
to be so general and theoretical that I may be held 
not yet fairly to have faced that issue at which I 
hinted in the beginning, the issue which Philistine 
minds raise bluntly : What is the use of poetry ? 
Philistines are willing to concede that there is a 
sensuous pleasure to be gained from verse. They 
are able to perceive how those who care for such 
things may find an enervating enjoyment in the 
linked sweetness of cadence melting into cadence, 
in musical line and honeyed phrase. What they 
are utterly unable to understand is how thoughtful 
men, men alive to the practical needs and the real 
interests of the race, can speak of poetry as if it 



246 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

were a thing of genuine importance in the history 
and development of mankind. It would not be 
worth while to attempt an answer to this for the 
benefit of the Philistines. They are a folk who 
are so completely ignorant of the higher good of 
life that it is impossible to make them understand. 
Their conception of value does not reach beyond 
pecuniary and physical standards ; they compre- 
hend nothing which is not expressed in material 
terms. One who attempted to describe a sym- 
phony to a deaf man would not be more at a loss 
for terms than must be he who attempts to set 
forth the worth of art to those ignorant of real 
values. The question may be answered, but to 
those who most need to be instructed in regard to 
aesthetic values any answer must forever remain 
unintelligible. 

There are, however, many sincere and earnest 
seekers after truth who are unable to clear up their 
ideas when they come in contact, as they must every 
day, with the assumption that poetry is but the 
plaything of idle men and women, a thing not only 
unessential but even frivolous. For them it is 
worth while to formulate some sort of a statement ; 
although to do this is like making the attempt to 
declare why the fragrance of the rose is sweet or 
why the hue of its petals gives delight. 

In the first place, then, the use of poetry is to 
nourish the imagination. I have spoken earlier of 
the impossibility of fulfilling the higher functions 
of life without this faculty. A common error re- 
gards imagination as a quality which has to do 



POETRY AND LIFE 247 

with rare and exceptional experiences ; as a power 
of inventing whimsical and impossible thoughts; 
as a sort of jester to beguile idle moments of the 
mind. In reality imagination is to the mental be- 
ing what blood is to the physical man. Upon it 
the intellect and the emotional consciousness alike 
depend for nourishment. Without it the mind 
is powerless to seize or to make really its own 
anything which lies outside of actual experience. 
Without it the broker could not so fully realize his 
cunning schemes as to manipulate the market and 
control the price of stocks ; without it the inventor 
could devise no new machine, the scientist grasp no 
fresh secret of laws which govern the universe. It 
is the divine power in virtue of which man subdues 
the world to his uses. In a word, imagination is 
that faculty which distinguishes man from brute. 

It is the beginning of wisdom to know ; it is 
the culmination of wisdom to feel. The intellect / 
accumulates ; the emotion assimilates. What we 
learn, we possess ; but what we feel, we are. The 
perception acquires, and the imagination realizes ; 
and thus it is that only through the imagination 
can man build up and nourish that inner being 
which is the true and vital self. To cultivate the 
imagination, therefore, is an essential — nay, more ; 
it is the one essential means of insuring the pro- 
gression of the race. This is the great office of 
all art, but perhaps most obviously is it the noble 
prerogative and province of poetry. " In the im- 
agination," wrote Coleridge, " is the distinguishing 
characteristic of man as a progressive being." To 



248 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

kindle into flame the dull embers of this god-like 
attribute is the first office of poetry; and were 
this all, it would lift the art forever above every 
cumbering material care and engrossing intellectual 
interest. 

In the second place, the use of poetry is to give 
man knowledge of his unrecognized experiences 
or his unrealized capacities of feeling. The poet 
speaks what many have felt, but what none save he 
can say. He accomplishes the hitherto impossible. 
He makes tangible and subject the vague emotions 
which disquiet us as if they were elusive ghosts 
haunting the dwelling of the soul, unsubdued and 
oppressive in their mystery. The joy of a moment 
he has fixed for all time ; the throb gone almost 
before it is felt he has made captive ; to the eva- 
sive emotion he has given immortality. In a word, 
it is his office to confer upon men dominion over 
themselves. 

Third, it is poetry which nourishes and preserves 
the optimism of the race. Poetry is essentially 
optimistic. It raises and encourages by fixing the 
mind upon the possibilities of life. Even when it 
bewails what is gone, when it weeps lost perfection, 
vanished joy, and crushed love, the reader receives 
from the poetic form, from the uplift of metrical 
inspiration, a sense that the possibilities of exist- 
ence overwhelm individual pain. The fact that 
such blessings could and may exist is not only con- 
solation when fate has wrenched them away, but 
the vividness with which they are recalled may 
almost make them seem to be relived. That 



POETRY AND LIFE 249 

A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, 

is not the whole story. In times of deepest woe it 
is this very remembrance which makes it possible to 
live on at all. The unconscious and the inevita- 
ble lesson of all true art, moreover, is that the pos- 
sibility of beauty in life is compensation for the 
anguish which its existence entails. The poet who 
weeps for the lost may have no word of comfort 
to offer, but the fact that life itself is of supreme 
possibilities is shown inevitably and persuasively 
by the fact that he is so deeply moved. He could 
not be thus stricken had he not known very ecsta- 
sies of joy ; and his message to the race is that 
such bliss has been and thus may be again. More 
than this, the fact that he in his anguish instinc- 
tively turns to art is the most eloquent proof that 
however great may be the sorrows of life there is 
for them an alleviating balm in aesthetic enjoyment. 
He may speak of 

Beauty that must die, 
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips, 
Bidding adieu ; 

but with the very thought of the brevity is coupled 
an exquisite sense of both beauty and joy in ever 
fresh renewal, so that the reader knows a subtle 
thrill of pleasure even at the mention of pain. 
Poe's proposition that poetry should be restricted 
to sorrowful themes probably arose from a more or 
less conscious feeling that the expression of de- 
spair is the surest means of conveying vividly a 
sense of the value of what is gone ; and whether 
Poe went so far as to realize it or not the fact is 



250 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

that the passion of loss most surely expresses the 
possible bliss of possession. Even when it would, 
art cannot deny the worth and the glory of exist- 
ence. The word of denial is chanted to a strain 
which inspires and affirms. Even when he would 
be most pessimistic the genuine poet must perforce 
preach in deathless tones the gospel of optimism. 

Fourth, poetry is the original utterance of the 
ideas of the world. It is easy and not uncommon 
to regard the art of the poet as having little to do 
with the practical conduct of life ; yet there is no 
man in civilization who does not hold opinions and 
theories, thoughts and beliefs, which he owes to 
the poets. Thought is not devised in the market- 
place. What thinkers have divined in secret is 
there shown openly by its results. Every poet of 
genius remakes the world. He leaves the stamp 
of his imagination upon the whole race, and philo- 
sophers reason, scientists explore, money-changers 
scheme, tradesmen haggle, and farmers plough or 
sow, all under conditions modified by what has 
been divulged in song. The poet is the great 
thinker, whose thought, translated, scattered, di- 
luted, spilled upon the ground and gathered up 
again, is the inspiration and the guide of mankind. 

If this seem extravagant, think for a little. 
Reflect in what civilization differs from savagery ; 
consider not the accidental and outward circum- 
stance, but the fundamental causes upon which 
these depend. If you endeavor to find adequately 
expressed the ideals of honor, of truth, of love, 
and of aspiration which are behind all the develop- 



POETRY AND LIFE 251 

ment of mankind, it is to the poets that you turn 
instinctively. It is possible to go farther than this. 
Knowledge is but a perception of relations. The 
conception of the universe is too vast to be assimi- 
lated all at once, but every perception of the way 
in which one part is related to another, one fact to 
another, one thing to the rest, helps toward a real- 
ization of the ultimate truth. It is the poet who 
first discerns and proclaims the relations of those 
facts which the experience of the race accumulates. 
From the particular he deduces the general, from 
the facts he perceives the principles which under- 
lie them. The general, that is, in its relation to 
that emotional consciousness which is the real life 
of man ; the principles which take hold not upon 
material things only, but upon the very conditions 
of human existence. All abstract truth has sprung 
from poetry as rain comes from the sea. Changed, 
diffused, carried afar and often altered almost be- 
yond recognition, the thought of the world is but 
the manifestation of the imagination of the world ; 
and it has found its first tangible expression in 
poetry. 

Fifth, poetry is the instructor in beauty. No 
small thing is human happiness, and human hap- 
piness is nourished on beauty. Poetry opens the 
eyes of men to loveliness in earth and sky and sea, 
in flower and weed, in tree and rock and stream, in 
things common and things afar a^ike. It is by the 
interpretation of the poet that mankind in general 
is aware of natural beauty ; and it is hardly less 
true that the beauty of moral and emotional worlds 



252 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

would be practically unknown were it not for these 
high interpreters. The race has first become 
aware of all ethereal and elusive loveliness through 
the song of the poet, sensitive to see and skillful 
to tell. For its beauty in and of itself, and for its 
revelation of the beauty of the universe, both ma- 
terial and intangible, poetry is to the world a boon 
priceless and peerless. 

Sixth, poetry is the creator and preserver of 
ideals. The ideal is the conception of the exist- 
ence beyond what is of that which may and should 
be. It is the measure of the capability of desire. 
" Man's desires are limited by his perceptions," 
says William Blake ; " none can desire what he 
has not perceived." What man can receive, what 
it is possible for him to enjoy, is limited to what 
he is able to wish for. The ideal is the highest 
point to which his wish has been able to attain, 
and upon the advancement of this point must de- 
pend the increasing of the possibilities of individ- 
ual experience. With the growth of ideals, more- 
over, comes the constant, however slow, realization 
of them. So true is this that it almost affords a 
justification of the belief that whatever mankind 
really desires must in the end be realized from the 
very fact that it is desired. Be that as it may, an 
ideal is the perception of a higher reality. It is 
the recognition of essential as distinguished from 
accidental truth ; the comprehension of the eternal 
principle which must underlie every fact. It is a 
realization of the meaning of existence ; a piercing 
through the transient appearance to the funda- 



POETRY AND LIFE 253 

mental and the enduring. The reader who finds 
himself caught away like St. Paul to the third 
heaven — " whether in the body I cannot tell ; or 
whether out of the body I cannot tell " — has no 
need to ask whether life is merely eating and 
drinking, getting and spending, marrying and giv- 
ing in marriage. He has for that transcendent 
moment lived the real life ; he has tasted the possi- 
bilities of existence ; he has for one glorious in- 
stant realized the ideal. When a poem has carried 
him out of himself and the material present which 
we call the real, then the verse has been for him 
as a chariot of fire in which he has been swirled 
upward to the very heart of the divine. 

When not actually under the influence of this 
high exalting power of poetry most men have a 
strange reluctance to admit that it is possible for 
them to be so moved ; and thus it may easily hap- 
pen that what has just been said may seem to the 
reader extravagant and florid. There are happily 
few, however, to whom there have not come mo- 
ments of inner illumination, few who cannot if 
they will call up times when the imagination has 
carried them away, and the delight of being so 
borne above the actual was a revelation and a joy 
not easily to be put into word. Recalling such an 
experience, you will not find it difficult to under- 
stand what is meant by the claim that poetry cre- 
ates in the mind of man an ideal which in turn it 
justifies also. 

Lastly and above all, the use of poetry is — 
poetry. 



254 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 

'T is the deep music of the rolling world 
Kindling within the strings of the waved air 
iEolian modulations. 

It is vain to endeavor to put into word the worth 
and office of poetry. At the last we are brought 
face to face with the fact that anything short of 
itself is inadequate to do it justice. To read a 
single page of a great singer is more potent than 
to pore over volumes in his praise. A single lyric 
puts to shame the most elaborate analysis or the 
most glowing eulogy ; in the end there is no re- 
source but to appeal to the inner self which is the 
true man ; since in virtue of what is most deep 
and noble in the soul, each may perceive for him- 
self that poetry is its own supreme justification ; 
that there is no need to discuss the relation of 
poetry to life, since poetry is the expression of life 
in its best and highest possibilities. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abbot, J. S. C, " Rollo," 201. 

Addison, 66. 

Advertising, 168-170. 

.aSschylus, 149. 

Aldrich, T. B., "Story of a Bad Boy," 
11, 15. 

Allusions, Biblical, 98-101 ; to folk- 
lore, 106 ; historical, 103-106 ; liter- 
ary, 107-108; mythological, 101- 
103. 

Amiel, " Journal Intime," 7. 

Amiot, 90. 

Andersen, Hans Christian, 196. 

Apprehension, 74. 

Ariosto, 143. 

Art, conventions in, 89 ; deals with 
the typical, 6; end of, 87; good, 
22 ; origin of, 3-5 ; sanity of, 174 ; 
truth in, 206 ; truth of, 209 ; vs. 
science, 32. 

Artist, office of, 207. 

Asbjornsen, 196. 

Augustine, St., " Confessions," 7. 

Austen, Jane, 189. 

Ballads, 222. 

Balzac, 189. 

Barrie, J. M., 211. 

Bible, 101, 140, 142, 145, 197; allu- 
sions to, 98-101 ; as a classic, 143- 
147 ; books of, characterized, 146 ; 
quoted, 100, 228 ; Revised Version 
vs. King James, 146. 

Black, William, 13, 211. 

Blackmore, R. D., 211. 

Blake, William, 54, 66; quoted, 58, 
121, 252. 

Boccaccio, 143. 

Breeding, good, 204. 

Bronte, Charlotte, 189. 

Broughton, Rhoda, 185. 

Browning, Mrs. E. B., quoted, 8, 132, 
225, 241 ; " Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese," 7-9. 

Browning, Robert, 92, 155, 179, 180; 
" Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 
Came," 48; lack of melody, 236; 
obscure in allusions, 106 ; " Pro- 
spice," 13 ; quoted, 244 ; " The Ring 
and the Book," 180. 

Bunyan, John, "Pilgrim's Progress," 
129. 



Burke, Edmund, quoted, 229. 

Burns, quoted, 234. 

Byron, Lord, 11, 12 ; quoted, 104. 

Cable, G. W., 211. 

Carleton, Will, " Farm Ballads," 223. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 42 ; quoted, 244. 

Carroll, Lewis, quoted, 236. 

Cervantes, 133, 140, 143; "Don Qui- 
xote," 129, 189. 

Character, 56. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 78, 116, 123, 124, 
140, 142, 146 ; as a classic, 151-152 ; 
Lowell on, 114 ; quoted, 114. 

Children, education of, 193-196, 223; 
reading of, 195-198. 

Civilization, 204. 

Classic, defined, 127. 

Classics, 176, 177 ; cause of the neg- 
lect of, 132-134 ; test of, 130. 

"Clerk Saunders," 222. 

Coleridge, S. T., 54, 66; "Hymn Be- 
fore Sunrise," etc., 75 ; quoted, 145, 
237 247 

Collins, "William, 66. 

Comprehension, 74. 

Conventions, 88-92. 

Cowper, William, quoted, 79. 

Crawford, P. M., 211. 

Critics, use of, 70. 

Dante, 58, 78, 140, 142, 146 ; as a clas- 
sic, 150-151. 

Darwin, Charles, 55. 

D'Aulnoy, Countess, 196. 

D'Aurevilly, Barbey, 169. 

Defoe, 66 ; " Robinson Crusoe," 197. 

De Gasparin, Madame, "The Near 
and the Heavenly Horizons," 48. 

De Maupassant, Guy, 182. 

Dekker, Thomas, quoted, 115. 

Dickens, Charles, 179, 180, 189 ; his 
metrical prose, 233. 

Doyle, A. Conan, 211 ; quoted, 134. 

Dryden, John, 66, 146 ; quoted, 152. 

" Duchess," The, 13, 185. 

Dumas, A.,pere, 182, 189 ; " D'Artag- 
nan Romances," 27, 92. 

Edgeworth, Maria, 201. 
Education, use of poetry in, 223. 
Eliot, George, 180, 187, 189. 



\ 



258 



INDEX 



Emerson, R. W., 179, 180; on trans- 
lations, 148; quoted, 43, 47, 103, 
225, 241. 

Emotion, 241-245 ; fashion in, 15 ; 
genuine, 68; tests of genuineness 
of, 10-20. 

Etiquette, 204. 

Euripides, 149. 

Experience the test of art, 10. 

Fairy stories, 196-197. 
Fiction, truth in, 188. 
Fielding, Henry, 66. 
Folk-lore, 223. 

Folk-songs, 137-139, 221-222. 
French authors, 170. 
Fuller, Margaret, 86. 

Genius, 20, 250. 
Gibbon, Edward, quoted, 74. 
Gladstone, W. E., 168. 
Goethe, quoted, 36, 178. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 66. 
Gower, John, 116. 
Gray, Thomas, quoted, 103. 
Greek literature, 149, 150. 
Greek sculpture, 150. 
Greek tragedians, 143, 148. 
Greeks, sanity of the, 148. 
Grimm, The Brothers, 194, 196. 

Haggard, Rider, " She," 26. 

Hannay, James, quoted, 57. 

Hardy, Thomas, " Far from the Mad- 
ding Crowd," 181 ; "The Return of 
the Native," 181, 208 ; " Tess of the 
D'Urbervilles," 181 ; " Under the 
Greenwood Tree," 181. 

Harris, J. C, " Uncle Remus," 197. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 179, 180, 189 ; 
Arthur Dimmesdale, 201 ; " The 
Marble Faun," 92; quoted, 83; 
"The Scarlet Letter," 2, 13, 201, 
208, 214 ; " Tanglewood Tales," 197 ; 
"The Wonder-Book," 197. 

Hazlitt, William, quoted, 113. 

" Helen of Kirconnell," 13, 138. 

Homer, 58, 78, 123, 131, 140, 142, 146, 
151 ; as a classic, 147-150. 

Hope, Anthony, 211. 

Hugo, Victor, 189 ; " Les Mis^rables," 
92, 208. 

Hunt, Leigh, quoted, 84. 

Hunt, W. M., quoted, 62. 

Ibsen, 172, 173, 177; "The Doll's 
House," 18 ; " Ghosts," 173. 

Imagination, 93, 246-248, 253; and 
thought, 251 ; creative, 111 ; the 
realizing faculty, 19 ; reality of, 54. 

Imaginative language, defined, 230- 
231. 

Imaginative quality, test of, 93. 

Impressionism, 69. 

Interest, temporary and permanent, 
127-129. 



Irreverence, 87. 
Isaiah, 146, 150. 

James, Henry, quoted, 203. 

Jewett, Sarah O., Miss, 211. 

Job, 146, 230. 

Johnson, Samuel, quoted, 84. 

Jonson, Ben, quoted, 83. 

Judd, Sylvester, "Margaret," 30. 

Keats, John, 54, 92, 112; letters to 
Miss Brawne, 62 ; " Ode to a Gre- 
cian Urn," 17 ; quoted, 94, 102, 249. 

Kingsley, Charles, 189. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 182 ; " Jungle 
Books," 197, 213. 

Laboulaye, Edouard, 196. 

Lamb, Charles, 133 ; quoted, 196. 

Language, imaginative, defined, 230- 
231. 

Lear, Edward, 235. 

Lessing, " Nathan the Wise," 48. 

Lincoln, Abraham, "Gettysburg Ad- 
dress," 112. 

Literature, books about, 65-68 ; con- 
vincing, 14 ; defined, 1-32 ; didac- 
tic, 201 ; early, 136 ; eighteenth cen- 
tury, 65, 66; gossip about, 62-65; 
history of, 65; juvenile, 193-195; 
morbid, 20, 177, 178 ; office of, 46- 
59 ; relative rank, 31 ; study of, de- 
fined, 33-44, 60-68 ; study of, diffi- 
cult, 72 ; talk about, 40-43 ; a unit, 
154 ; vs. science, 55. 

" Littell's Living Age," 39. 

LongfeUow, H. W., 181. 

Lowell, J. R., 67; quoted, 78, 102, 
114, 173, 216. 

Macaulay, T. B., 220 ; quoted, 207. 

Maclaren, Ian, 211, 213. 

Maeterlinck, 172. 

Magazines, 163-166. 

Malory, Thomas, " Morte d' Arthur," 
196. 

Marcus Aurelius, " Reflections," 7. 

Marlowe, Christopher, "The Jew of 
Malta," 76. 

Melody, 235-240. 

Meredith. George, " The Ordeal of 
Richard Feverel," 92, 181, 208. 

Metre, 227-230. 

Milton, John, 108, 140, 143 ; " L' Alle- 
gro," 106; "II Penseroso," 107; 
"Lycidas," 77; "On the Morning 
of Christ's Nativity," 100 ; quoted, 
63, 113, 163. 

Modernity, 169. 

Moliere, 140, 143. 

Montaigne, 133, 140, 143. 

Morbidity, 140. 

Morley, John, 67. 

"Mother Goose," 96, 221. 

Mulock, D. M., 189. 

Music, barbaric, 90 ; Chinese, 90. 



INDEX 



259 



Musset, A. de, "Mile, de Maupin," 
177. 

Newspapers, 162, 163. 

Nordau, Max, "Degeneration," 170; 

quoted, 171. 
Notes, use of, 84, 109. 
Notoriety, 128, 172. 
Novels, realistic, 209 ; vs. poetry, 245 ; 

with a theory, 167. 
Novelty, 134. 

" Old Oaken Bucket," The, 17. 
Originality, 170. 
Ouida, 17, 41. 

Page, T. N., 211. 

Pater, Walter, "Marius the Epicu- 
rean," 25. 

Periodicals, 162-166. 

Petrarch, 143. 

Philology not the study of literature, 
79. 

Plato, quoted, 234. 

Plutarch, letter to his wife, 50. 

Poe, E. A., "Lygeia," 22; quoted, 
104, 105, 237, 249 ; Tales, 21. 

Poetry, defined, 227 ; form is essen- 
tial, 236, 239 ; how different from 
prose, 231, 232 ; office in education, 
223; office of, 245-252; optimism 
of, 248-250 ; origin, 5 ; reading of, 
244 ; #s. novels, 245. 

Pope, Alexander, 66. 

Prose, how different from poetry, 231- 
232 ; language of, 231. 

Public guided by the few, 10. 

Quincy, Josiah, 50. 

Rabelais, 133, 140. 

Reade, Charles, 189. 

Reading, first, 85 ; for amusement, 
210 ; measure of character, 159 ; se- 
rious matter, 87 ; should be a pleas- 
ure, 71-73 ; test of, 86 ; works as 
units, 81. 

Realism, 69, 209. 

Reverence, 87. 

Rhythm, 220, 221, 227-229. 

Richardson, Samuel, 66. 

Rossetti, D. G., 181 ; " Sister Helen," 
119, 120. 

Rousseau, "Confessions," 7. 

Ruskin, John, quoted, 95. 

Russell, W. Clark, 13, 211. 

Sanity, 140, 174. 

Schopenhauer, quoted, 63, 227. 

Science vs. art, 32. 

Science vs. literature, case of Darwin, 

55. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 189. 
Sculpture, Aztec, 89 ; Greek, 89. 
Sensationalism, 26. 
Sentiment, 16, 157 ; defined, 15. 



Sentimentality, 16, 139, 157 ; defined, 

15. 
Shakespeare, William, 3, 35, 41, 53, 

58, 65, 77, 86, 92, 93, 107, 118. 124, 

133, 140, 143, 145, 147, 173, 214, 216 ; 

as a classic, 152-153 ; condensation 

of, 93 ; " Cymbeline," 75 ; epithets 

of, 112, 231; for children, 197; 

"Hamlet," 81, 215; "King Lear," 

81; "The Merchant of Venice," 

115-118; "Othello," 81; quoted, 

102, 104, 113, 114, 115, 229, 231, 

239 ; " Sonnets," 8, 239. 
Shelley, P. B., 92, 131 ; quoted, 254 ; 

"Stanzas Written in Dejection," 

etc., 17. 
Shorthouse, J. H., " John Inglesant," 

29. 
Sienkiewicz, 182 ; " The Deluge," 92. 
Sincerity, 12-15. 
Smile, sardonic, 95. 
Sophocles, 149. 

Spenser, Edmund, 123, 124, 143, 197. 
Standards, 141 ; of criticism, 161. 
Steele, Sir Richard, 66. 
Stephen, Leslie, 67. 
Stevenson, R. L., 181 ; " Kidnapped," 

197 ; quoted, 57 ; " Treasure Island," 

27, 197. 
Stockton, Frank, "The Adventures 

of Captain Horn," 27. 
Story, happy ending of a, 215 ; the 

short, 211-214. 
Stowe, Mrs. H. B., on Byron, 62. 
Suckling, Sir John, quoted, 106. 
Suggestion, 111-114, 118-120, 230, 235. 
Suttner, Baroness von, 161. 
Swift, Jonathan, 66 ; " Gulliver's 

Travels," 197. 
Swinburne, A. C, 181; "Atalanta in 

Calydon," 228; excess of melody, 

236. 
Symbolism, 69. 
Sympathy between reader and author, 

82. 

Talleyrand, quoted, 38. 

Tasso, 143. 

Taste a measure of character, 3. 

Technical excellence, 25. 

Tennyson, Alfred, 92, 155, 179, 180, 

232; "Idylls of the King," 180 

"In Memoriam," 7, 50; quoted 

101, 249. 
Thackeray, W. M., 42, 179, 180, 189 

Beatrix Esmond, 92 ; Colonel New. 

come, 13; "Henry Esmond," 208 

Major Pendennis, 201 ; " Penden 

nis," 200. 
Titian, 42-43. 
Tolstoi, 172, 177 ; " The Kreutzer So 

nata," 20, 214; "War and Peace,' 

29 
Traiil, H. D., quoted, 190. 
Translations, use of, 147. 148. 
Trollope, Anthony, 180, 189. 



260 



INDEX 



Tupper, M. F., 3. 
Turgenieif, 182. 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 160. 

Vedas, The, 145. 
Verlaine, 22. 

"Waly, waly," 138. 
Wendell, Barrett, quoted, 42. 



Weyman, S. J., 211. 

Whittier, J. G., 181. 

Wilkins, Miss M. E., 211, 213. 

Wordsworth, William, 54, 66; "The 
Daffodils," 17 ; quoted, 108, 225, 
238, 239, 241, 243 ; " To Lucy," 13. 

Zend-Avesta, The, 145. 
Zola, 172, 173, 177 ; "L'Assommoir," 
173. 



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